From Pastor Eric’s Study - May 2025

Christ has Risen! This proclamation might continue to ring in our ears for some weeks as we continue in this season of Easter. This year I was delighted to receive “Christ has Risen” on Saturday from Berit in New Zealand and the Walkers in Korea, what a delight to begin hearing that announcement ring out around the world a day ahead of us. This is a time when we keep thinking about how the story of Jesus' resurrection is relevant in our lives today. Easter is a celebration of hope, of new life, and the power of love, the affirmation of how non-violence triumphed over fear and the addiction to power and bullying-violence that fueled it. In Jesus’ day it was the triumph of God over the ways of the Roman Empire and their oppression of those who didn’t support them. Easter is the proclamation that choosing the power of love over the love of power actually works. Our story sometimes feels like a fairy tale. Still, the Easter proclamation is a power that sustains us profoundly on life’s journey.

In this hemisphere it always feels like creation is joining in the Easter proclamation as crocus blossoms fill the front yard and daffodils and lilies begin pushing up. This year, with Easter arriving so late, the weather and sun’s lengthening days all reinforce the feeling that creation is sharing in the glorious witness. This year those thoughts were given pause while talking with Berit in the southern hemisphere. I’m reminded that not all people get to see the same signs around them. Down-under, the days are shortening and fall is unfolding. It makes me wonder how churches decorate for Easter, or think about all of creation joining in the exultation. It is a clear reminder that our Easter promise isn’t rooted in external realities but rather, in an unseen promise of a love of God that will not end.

Last week we finished a four-part series on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The last session spoke of how his faith sustained him as he was imprisoned by the Nazis for having been involved in underground operations trying to smuggle Jews to safety. He was imprisoned for trying to live his faith. From prison he wrote: “I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For that purpose he needs men who make the best use of everything. I believe that God will give us all the strength we need to help us to resist in all time of distress. But he never gives it in advance, lest we should rely on ourselves and not on him alone.” Bonhoeffer spoke of a depth and humility of faith that can too easily get lost in a world that abuses faith for political ends instead of relying on it as the strength to live God's kingdom ways.

In our study we also encountered a quote from Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who wrote: “the last of the human freedom – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way … Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.

Our world is not always crocuses and daffodils and lengthening days. Lots of times the world feels dark and fearful, broken and exhausting. And Easter’s proclamation bursts into that world even more vigorously. Love is the answer. The selfless, humble way of Jesus wins over and over again.

The proclamation of Easter isn’t dependent on external forces of seasons or proclamations. It is the transformative love of God that we are invited to proclaim with the fullness of our beings. We are directed to live out the command of Maundy Thursday, to love one another as Jesus loves us. The resurrection is the proclamation of a grace for all - without cost, without prejudice, or division, dehumanizing or the diminishing of another. The resurrection promises power to Jesus’ demand to love one another. The cost of that radical, extravagant love was death. But the story of God in which we find hope to be bold, is that He has indeed Risen! That is the victory of Jesus way over the ways of the empire and a broken world. May we choose that freedom and that proclamation.

From the Pastor’s Study - April 2025

The journey of Lent is supposed to challenge us to deepen our faith and draw closer to the power and the love of God. Each week on Wednesday night, we gather to sing Holden Evening Prayer and hear Mary’s bold “yes” to God's request to be God's servant. Mary’s song continues with a vision that reverses the ways of the world. My love for those sung words grows with each passing season. I now see them as such a gift as we journey in Lent and approach Holy Week. It feels strange sometimes to sing of Jesus' birth as we prepare for his death. But the whole point of his ministry and the whole reason that he will be executed by the state is because of the radical good news of his existence.

Jesus came to offer us a different way of being and loving, but every generation has tried to find the loopholes in his message. I struggle to understand why God's extravagant love should be so hard… but it seems that something in our human condition loves tribalism more than we love God. Even on the cross, Jesus challenges us to overcome our stereotypes and divisions. Think about what it means to follow someone who looks at the very soldiers who are crucifying him and proclaims: “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Imagine Jesus looking to the criminal beside him who confesses to committing a crime and sharing that compassionate grace: “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

I don’t know what will be happening in our world by the time that you read this article, but I can imagine that God’s extravagant grace will be under attack at least as much as it is today. We’ve heard of the rewriting of history to expunge transgender people from the history of Stonewall, of the demonization of immigrants and refugees, of an attack on any acknowledgement or examination of the uncomfortable parts of our nation’s history. For goodness’ sake, Jesus challenges the history and practices of his own tradition, and we certainly should be doing the same. As followers of Jesus, we ought to be the first ones hungering for justice instead of hiding from it. I have always been so proud of our denomination for being at the forefront of offering apologies for injustices on behalf of the church… it’s hard, and it’s what Jesus’ gospel calls us to embrace.

Throughout history we have seen dominant groups demonize others to gain power or privilege. The group changes, regularly, but the usefulness of targeting and demonizing others remains. Jesus lived a life of God's extravagant love and grace and every generation crucifies that message over and over again.

There was a pastor named Martin Niemöller in Germany in the second world war who is often quoted.. His famous words are transcribed on the wall of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me.

Diana Butler Bass, historian, theologian, and writer reminds us that: “Pastor Niemöller … was a German nationalist who, in the 1920s and early 1930s, supported Hitler and the Nazis. He hated Communism and socialism and workers — he believed that they had betrayed Germany in the aftermath of WWI. He worked against the Weimar Republic, thinking it to be politically weak and corrupt. Indeed, Niemöller voted for the Nazis, even in the 1933 elections which handed Germany over to Hitler.

But Niemöller began to change his mind when Hitler interfered with church policies and applied racial tests to both clergy and laity, even insisting that German churches refrain from teaching or reading from the Old Testament.

Niemöller’s resistance started when the Nazis applied their brutal and racist agenda to the church — Niemöller’s church, the community he most cared about, was vowed to serve, and lead.

Then, he realized that they were coming for him, too. It took him a while. It was a process. But he spoke out. He preached against Hitler and Nazism. He was one of the founders of the Confessing Church. He was detained several times between 1934 and 1937. Then, in 1937, he was arrested for treason and spent the next seven years in various prisons and concentration camps, including Dachau.”

Niemöller changed his mind and he changed his perspective… I would say that he finally woke up to understand Jesus’ command to see the other as also beloved of God. He needed to be reminded not to allow God's extravagant grace to be abused out of fear or hunger for power or privilege.

We are called to be as bold in our love as Jesus. The promise is that this love cannot be killed. That’s the proclamation of Easter! We start in love, and we return to love… but in between, we must choose how we will live and who we will follow. Lent calls us to that journey and the cross drives our choices home. Are we willing to change ourselves to embrace God's ways if it means loving beyond our comfort zone? Our faith is a story of death and resurrection. Often what needs to die are the parts within ourselves that are unwilling to be changed by love and grace. Let hate, fear, prejudice, and divisions die so that we might share in the rebirth of God's enduring promise of grace. Amen.  

From Pastor’s Eric’s Study - March 2025

From Pastor Eric’s Study – March 2025

“The body of Christ, given for you.” I’ve said those words thousands of times as I’ve served communion to a community with whom I share the journey and, with whom I share God's love. This morning, I read an article by Lutheran Pastor Diane Roth reflecting on what she called the “for-you-ness” of the sacrament. She shared how the experience of offering this gift impacted her life and ministry, and it resonated so deeply with my own experiences over the years.

We are incredibly blessed to share this journey of faith with one another, seeking to encourage one another to draw ever closer to our relationship with God. Even as we know the hunger in our own souls to hear the assurance of God's love offered freely for us again and again, most of us still struggle to mirror that same freely given love for others. Soon we will once again begin our Lenten journey, a spiritual pilgrimage in time that encourages us to reorient our lives away from our stubborn ways and back to God's ways of freely given grace. Our temptation is always to hear the Good News as being particularly for us. We tend to listen less passionately for how our receiving that grace should shatter all of the barriers that we have created within ourselves. If we let God's love work fully within us, it would melt all the limits that we construct… and that would be frightening new territory.

I have heard lots of people through the years talk about cultivating a spirit of curiosity as the antidote to certainties, to division, and to despair. When we’re curious, we open ourselves to learning new things. Seeing God at work in new ways, we allow the possibility of setting ourselves free to receive the gift of God's love and then pass it on to others.

When we receive that “for-you-ness,” it is only half of the spiritual gift. The other half comes when we share it with the next person, and the next person, and then the next person. As Diane Roth concluded: “Jesus didn’t come to make us feel good. He came to set us free, whether it feels good or not.” The love of God made known to us in Jesus challenges us to take seriously the work of sharing that grace even when it hurts or is terribly hard. We are called to bear grace that works to dismantle racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of oppression. God's grace offered in its for-you-ness demands that we see God and love God in our immigrant and transgender siblings, in the democrat and the republican, in the Christian and the Muslim and the Hindu and the Jew… that we see the love of God in all.

Our Lenten journey reminds us that we are dust, just star-dust blessed by God with life and God's love. We are blessed, and so are every “they” that we can imagine. On this Lenten journey may we journey ever deeper into God's challenge to love and affirm as powerfully as God. Amen.

From Pastor Eric’s Study – February 2025

February makes me think of St. Valentine and his feast day that commemorates love and the faithfulness of a Saint who is hard to pin down. The stories speak of an imprisoned priest healing the blindness of his jailer’s daughter, causing the jailer and his household to convert to Christianity. There are stories of Valentine marrying people behind the government’s back in order to keep them out of military service. He becomes a saint associated with love who ultimately refuses to denounce his faith, ultimately leading to his being martyred on February 14th.

Love and faithfulness are at the heart of our story, but when we encounter it with Jesus, it is more the stuff that will end up getting you martyred than getting a valentine’s card from a friend. Jesus challenges his followers to love their neighbors and even challenges us to love our enemies. Isn’t it interesting that the challenge isn’t to like them, or to love only our friends? The challenge is to offer a love that sees in others the belovedness of God. I recently listened to a TED Talk that talked about how powerful empathy can be to help people understand that we share more in common than all that we assume may separate us. There is this reminder that when we love like Jesus, we find that others always carry within them that sacred spark of God's love.

Sometimes it’s incredibly challenging to honor that spark or to love it into a light bright enough to shine through the barriers we may create. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often preached about the task of loving. In an oft shared sermon he preached:

…I’m so happy [Jesus] didn’t say, “Like your enemies,” because it’s kind of difficult to like some people. Like is sentimental; like is an affectionate sort of thing. And you can’t like anybody who’s bombing your home and threatening your children. It’s hard to like a senator who’s spending all of his time in Washington standing against all of the legislation that will make for better relationships and that will make for brotherhood. It’s difficult to like them. But Jesus says, “Love them,” and love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive, creative goodwill for all men. And so Jesus was expressing something very creative when he said, “Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.”

It's easy to speak of love. It’s much more challenging to live it as Jesus did. The rewards of choosing love change our hearts and have the power to change the world. Oh, you might be criticized for living that vision, most of God's faithful have been… you might get rather frustrated that it seems like nothing is changing… and yet, empathy, loving our neighbors and even our enemies harnesses the very power of God.