From the Pastor’s Study - October 2020

I was talking with my wise-sage wife recently and she told me that we all need to hear a word that is more hopeful and lighter – enough of all of the news of the world. She reminded me of a post that someone had offered about one of our favorite National Parks, Zion. The observer said something like “you need to be willing to see beauty differently to fully appreciate Zion.” I think that the idea was that if you are looking for lush green landscapes, or startling geysers, or soaring glacier clad mountains, you are going to encounter something radically different. The beauty is in layers of rock, and how myriad colors of red stone interact. The beauty is the power of a little water running through a slot canyon or a moment where you feel like you are observing a moonscape. I have always cherished those moments when we are challenged to see with new eyes. As a college student I remember an art teacher who gave us the challenge to carefully study a one-centimeter square on any object that we chose. We were then to take that tiny little bit of our world, and paint or draw it as an image not smaller than a couple of feet square. Suddenly a flake of oatmeal, or a tiny spot on a rock, or a tiny portion of your hand, became the source of seeing the world through new eyes. Any time that we are forced to change our perspective we have the opportunity to see and learn new things.
I cherish a journey of faith that regularly offers just this kind of reframing of what we think that we see and what we think that we know. Whether that is an observation that cuts through thousands of years’ of assumptions about a text, or something as a simple as being awakened to how the translation of a word always carries with it the theology of the translator, it can expand our relationship with God and our faith. This last spring, I encountered an article that challenged something as simple as the name change that we all have learned forever as Saul became Paul. The scholar cited the textual evidence to point out that considering the name change as an expression of a change of religious perspective did not fit with the Biblical canon. This scholar looked at long-held assumptions through new eyes, eyes that perhaps because of some “aha” moment allowed them to ask questions about the Biblical story. In this instance the scholar noted that Paul lived in a bi-cultural world, a world that many people still navigate every day. Within Jewish society he used the Jewish name Saul, within Roman society he used his Roman name Paul… The simple observation invites us to see Saul/Paul through a different lens and to further remember that he was someone who had spent his whole life navigating the intersection of conflicting cultures and religions. It is an interesting observation that will have me pay different attention to something a simple as a name.
We live our faith in world that is always changing and that offers both challenges and blessings. We are called by God to engage both. We are encouraged to learn how to see with eyes of faith. This week anyone who has looked at the setting sun has been stunned by the extraordinary beauty of the brilliant orange-red globe hanging in the sky. Its beauty should take our breath away, but the reminder that this vision has been caused by all of the smoke that is travelling from the massive fires in the west should humble us to remember how our world and our lives are always interconnected with others. Both of those observations are calls to faith. God constantly demands that we cherish life, that we celebrate blessings, and that we be servants of love seeking justice and wholeness for all people.
We are living in unusual times. Much of what we have been accustomed to in our world has been altered in large and small ways in the last months. Certainly, for us not being gathered in our church building has been a bold expression of a changed reality. Each of those changes is also an opportunity to refocus our ways of seeing, to take a deep breath and center our souls, and then to consider what wonder God might be offering in this moment.
May we all take the time to be touched by the blessings before us. May we all be bold in sharing the glimpses of grace with one another and the world.   Pastor Eric
 

From the Pastor's Study - Rev. Eric Kirkegaard - September 2020

I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I keep noticing how the last couple of months have worn down my patience, stretched my tolerance, and just generally been exhausting. When I look at the world around me, it seems like many people are experiencing the same thing. It is very hard to be living through a time when so many things feel like they are challenging everything to which we are accustomed.

For years I have read the stories of the call of the disciples and Jesus’ invitation to leave everything you know and come and follow him. In the past I have named my journey into ministry as a glimpse into answering that call. But the last many months have highlighted Jesus’ challenge in extraordinary new ways. When the whole world is cast into uncertainty and grief and nobody has the answers for how this will proceed, it leads to a very different relationship with leaving behind what we know so that we might follow Jesus’ way. That expression, “the way,” is how Jesus’ earliest disciples described themselves. They were not yet known as Christians, just followers of The Way. And the way of Jesus that we encounter in the Gospels is quite distinct from the ways of the world. It seems like every time that the disciples try to hold on to something, or control something, or to gain advantage for themselves, that Jesus challenges them and us with a different directive. Jesus was offering a way of being more than something to be attained.

I found myself thinking about this while I was away for a few weeks. I was reading an ancient Chinese epic novel (the abridged version) and remembering an experience that I had as a college student studying in Thailand. We were learning about Buddhism and spent a number of days in a Buddhist temple learning to meditate, to go around the town begging with the monks for their daily food, doing the simple work around the temple that was supposed to focus our minds and help us to let go of our attachments to desires – part of the heart of Buddhism. During this time, I had a conversation with one of the young monks who had been there for some time. He talked about how wonderful this new way was for him; how he was learning to let go of his attachments, to begin to extinguish the desires that led to attachment that led to loss that then led to suffering. In the midst of his description of learning to let go of his attachments, he began to talk about the power of meditation and how if you worked hard enough that you could attain all kinds of magical abilities. The more that he talked, the clearer it became that his great motivation for practicing religion was to gain cool new abilities. The novel that I was reading had Buddhists and Taoists constantly struggling with this same tension between the core of their faith and their very human desire to attain power or prestige, or to have fine extravagant religious articles around them. I started thinking about so much of our world and our journeys of faith.

While we were driving, we passed a couple of billboards that sounded like echoes of this conflict; there was one that said “Believe in Jesus Christ and you will gain eternal life”, another just had chapter and verse of scripture that pointed you toward believing so that you will be saved. I was reminded of how often faith can be transformed into something that sounds transactional – if I do this then I will receive that. In so many ways this is the very opposite of the way that Jesus taught and the life that he led. A transactional faith seems to reinforce the ways of the world that are always asking “what’s in it for me?” This contrasts with the ways of Jesus which keep pushing us beyond transactional thinking toward relational thinking. It is not about what do I get, it’s about how am I to be, how am I to live, how am I to care for the other and God equally.

As I sat in the campgrounds a series of words kept popping through my head: Boomboxes, Billboards, Beer, Facemasks, and Faith. There was one campsite where the neighbor had a really old boombox sitting on the end of their picnic table. They had the speakers pointed away from them and toward us as they decided that we all wanted to spend the day listening to their country music station. It was not the experience that I had settled in to enjoy. But they seemed quite oblivious to the fact that their desires might impact those of their neighbors. Those Billboards seemed to sell a curiously similar self-focused way of life with their curious expression of a piety that seemed to be selling something transactional rather than relational. I do not think that was their intent any more than the Monk of my youth was trying to suggest that his pursuit of Buddhism was about what he would gain, but that seemed like the way that faith was being marketed.

So, then the beer… Well, in another campground the neighbor had needed to walk through our site to get to the water spigot and in the process had asked about our plans. As we shared that we were hoping to do some hiking and exploring a few waterfalls, he eagerly offered some of his favorites. A few minutes later he appeared with a well dog-eared book that he offered to us for the day to look through to see if it would be helpful. There was nothing about his engagement that was imposing, just wanting to be helpful and neighborly. That morning, several of the people in the campsites around us politely offered a kind word, a thoughtful interaction. At the end of the day I told Laura that I would love to see if the tiny brewery in this tiny town had a decent IPA. As it turned out, they did not have any of their bottles left, so with some encouragement from my non-beer drinking wife I picked up a growler to take back to the campsite.. Now I had no idea how much beer comes in a growler… but I can tell you that my glass tasted pretty nice, but the part that tasted even better was asking all of the neighbors if they liked beer and sharing a glass full with a number of them before using the last of that jug on the fire. It was a simple reminder of the joy that God offers us when he points us away from the transactional and toward the relational. Our faith is not supposed to be about us and what we get from it. Instead, our faith is about a different way of being. We are called to leave behind the things that we cling to so that we can follow a new way of abundant love, a love that thinks about the neighbor alongside of God. That journey of letting go of our desires and our ways in favor of compassion has never been easy. All the religions of the world seem to focus on that transformative journey. Indeed, the prayer to believe in Jesus so that we might take hold of a life that really is life is fundamentally about getting out of our own way and focusing on the love with which Jesus would lead us. And yet every tradition also stumbles over our very human desire to be in control and to place ourselves at the center of the story.

One of the ironies of the way that we are created is that study after study shows that we receive more joy from doing something for someone else than we do by doing for ourselves. And yet most of us are bound to a culture that encourages living the opposite of that.

So, there was one more word that was running through that litany: facemasks. I don’t like wearing facemasks. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who likes wearing facemasks, or being told to wash their hands constantly, or social distance… but I do very much like doing anything that I can to try to help to keep my neighbor healthy and to do my part to help our world to get back to a little greater normalcy. And if that means leaving behind the normal that I have known in order to embrace a different way, then I am going to try to live that way rooted in the love to which Jesus calls us. Jesus calls to each of us to leave behind what we have known and follow him. What better time to ponder that invitation?

I pray that when we find ourselves grieving or frustrated, exhausted or focused on our own wants, that we might slow down and take a deep breath of kindness. Look around and see the wonder with which God continually surrounds us and then live The Way that is not our way or the world’s way, but the way of God's love for all. God bless us,

From the Pastor's Study - July 2020

How long, O Lord; will You ignore me forever?

How long will You hide Your face from me?

How long will I have cares on my mind,

grief in my heart all day?

[…]

But I trust in Your faithfulness,

my heart will exult in Your deliverance.

I will sing to the Lord,

for He has been good to me.

               Psalm 13

The other day I once again hit that all too familiar wall of feeling like “how long, God, is all of this going to go on?” The uncertainties of living in an altered world are exhausting. If the pandemic hasn’t worn us out, then certainly the challenges of protests and calls to address a deep history of racism and the outgrowths of deep historical inequalities weigh heavily on the heart and soul. There are calls for us to be moving toward a different way of being in our world, but those calls always mean that we need to be willing to grow and to be transformed in our ways of thinking and being on every front. That challenge quickly feels overwhelming and I find myself hearing again the words of lament that play out throughout the Psalms and much of scripture. But what I love is that almost always those words of lament conclude with words of trust and faithfulness, singing and goodness. Psalm 13 contains that dichotomy so beautifully. In those words I hear not only a proclamation of hope, a way where we see no way, but I also hear a tendency that scripture offers in lots of different ways – whether it’s multiple stories of creation, or multiple accounts of kingdoms, or multiple accounts of the life of Jesus that are each unique and often different enough that they beg not to be simply harmonized. It’s a lesson that we could learn a great deal from in our own world in these moments when the polarization seems to have grown ever greater on so many fronts. I keep feeling a deep resistance to the binary thinking that is being so constantly fueled in our world. The simplicity of us and them, of self-righteousness or demonization, feels so counter to God's witness of love.

I preached a few weeks ago about the power of a spirit of curiosity. I had that Psalm running through my head this week and smiled as I entertained that spirit of curiosity about how the Psalmist could proclaim abandonment and lament right alongside of faithfulness and exultant singing. If two such potent emotions can exist alongside one another, then why not engage our spirit of curiosity with some of the other things that seem destined to strain our beings?

Jesus tells us that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves… he teaches us to pray Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done… there’s this beautiful challenge for us to treat the other as a reflection of God. To learn and listen from those who may see the world very different from ourselves. To counter everything from pandemic restrictions, to race relations, to questions about how to handle monuments to an imperfect history with the kind of generous curiosity that might help us to learn God's ways.

Most weeks you will hear me praying in church for justice. Theologically justice aspires to treat everyone and everything as God-breathed. For people it is the understanding that we carry the very image of God in our being. It pushes us to work toward a fairness that honors and learns to love and cherish the story of everyone, as well as to understand that God's blessings have not been equally shared through the ages.

We have a lot of work to do in growing into the responsibility of reflecting God's love… this week I’m feeling like part of that begins by again practicing holding both/and instead of either/or thinking. By grace God has called all of us to be the body of Christ, when we work together in all of our diversity, and honor all the parts of that body, then we draw a little closer to that kingdom proclamation of walking in God's faithfulness and knowing the song of God's goodness in our lives.

God’s Shalom I pray,

Pastor Eric

From the Pastor’s Study – June 2020

“By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”  - Psalm 137: 1-4
 
I am humbled by the way that the Psalms move from lament to prayer, despair to praise. I think that before I really understood the context of Psalm 137 I knew its power. It was set to Reggae music that played through the night in my college art studio and spoke to me again as I heard these words lifted up by Peter, Paul, and Mary. But when the words really gained life was as I spent enough time with the story of Israel to understand the despair of being exiled from home and needing to remember how to find joy and grounding in an un-chosen and un-welcome reality. For the Israelites, the Babylonians had laid siege to Jerusalem/Zion and had taken much of the population into that strange land by waves. The experience of trying to find God in the midst of that scattering, that diaspora state, becomes a powerful memory n the shaping of Judaism and then Christianity. Throughout history, God's people have sought God in those moments when their entire world was turned upside down.
Of course, we find ourselves in another scattered state of being. Slowly our communities are opening and we are trying to put back together the ways of life that we cherish. If we are wise, we realize that thus far we have been very lucky not to have watched the global wildfire of pandemic take hold here… but a good measure of that has looked more like luck than care or respect for this invisible threat. A brand-new virus has scattered us to our homes and to a new reality of social distancing and increased care for how we are to interact. As our world has changed, there is great cause for grieving. Significant life events are postponed or almost unrecognizably altered: graduations, weddings, funerals. Jobs and workplaces have changed and, for some, vanished. Teachers, pastors, and all of those people who have answered a calling to be in constant interaction with others have found themselves in a strange land of phone calls and computer interactions. There is a great grief that cries out from within many of us and it sounds a lot like those exiles sitting down by the river’s shore and weeping for what we remember of the past.
What we know of Israel’s time is that the time of exile also became a defining time for the people. I read scholars who attribute our having a written Hebrew Bible to that period of not being where the people wanted to be. If we read that Psalm, we hear the weeping and the lament… but I have also always been drawn to the sitting down by the water and hanging the harps on the branches of the willows. That image holds echoes of the 23rd Psalm’s story of restoration and care. Even in the midst of our trials, if we look up, we encounter God's life-giving activity: the waters of Babylon and a willow tree. Or for us, the loud proclamation from God is that God is very busy in our world in all that blooms and grows and has life in this season. If we only look up from our distress, we cannot help but to see signs of God's life and grace all around us.
There is a song to which I was just introduced that took words that are attributed to an unknown Jewish author during the second world war… the details of the attribution are quite unclear, but the text is incredibly simple and powerful:
“I believe in the sun, even when it’s not shining.
I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it.
I believe in God, even when God is silent.”
We are living in a time when we are encouraged to remember how good it will be to be together again, a time when our laments of grief might again be turned to songs of joy. But like the faithful through the ages, we don’t know the timing of that return. So in this moment, in this place wherever it may be, we are invited to open our hearts in faith and to believe and to trust and to see God's hand at work all around us.
May God continue to bless us and to bind us together across time and space as we hold fast to hope and love.

We have been working hard to discern how and when we might be able to gather again for worship…
There are some in our community who have been expressing their longing to be able to reconnect in some safe physical way. There are others who are content to ere on the side of caution and wait until all is once again safe for us to gather. This is new territory for all of us, and all that we are learning from a health/science standpoint suggests that things will not change dramatically anytime soon. We are also aware that gathering inside our sanctuary with a large group for a prolonged period (some say more than 15 minutes) greatly increases our risk should.
In the effort to support our community we have been exploring the possibility of worshiping outdoors a couple of times this summer – being outdoors where we are mostly not re-breathing the same air is a significantly safer option for us. We finally secured some dates earlier this week for us to be able to experiment with this kind of gathering. We are required to have no more than 25% capacity in the park (the same guidance that we would be under when we are finally cleared to open the church). It is also required that everyone maintain a six-foot social distance, and wear face masks. These services will be a learning experience for us to see if we can gather together in a way that allows us to see each other’s sparkling eyes peaking over a mask, to share in worship, and still to be as safe as we can be. All the health guidelines suggest that large gatherings of people over a sustained period of time presents the greatest risk for transmission of this new corona virus. Being outdoors will help mitigate the risks but cannot remove them. For those who wish, let us humbly gather and witness to how we can love one another enough to seek to keep each other safe and set a faithful example for our community. For those who feel uncomfortable gathering or are in any high-risk group, we will continue to post our worship services online.