From the Pastor's Study - February 2021

Twenty years ago, I had the blessing to travel to Haiti as a part of a team that was negotiating a church partnership. It was just around the time of our presidential election, and shortly thereafter, theirs. In the aftermath of our election, we spent weeks examining ballots and all of us learning about “hanging chads” as some 500 ballots in one county held the country in suspense. I don’t remember all of the issues about counting and deadlines, but I have often lifted up the extraordinary power of a democracy that believes deeply enough in a peaceful transition of power that everyone abiding by the decision offer by a divided Supreme Court that stopped the process and awarded Bush the Presidency. I have shared that story because at the same time, Haiti was being torn apart following an election where President Aristide had received 91.7% of the vote but many declared the election questionable. That country erupted in violence and the whole government was thrown into what would be a much too familiar pattern of unrest. The stark contrast has always stuck with me.

I was stunned on the Feast of Epiphany — the occasion when the church celebrates the arrival of the Magi and the proclamation that Jesus’ birth is light for all the world — when suddenly our nation’s capital was thrown into violent unrest. I was stunned to see racist symbols, violence, and the demonization of others grow out of the disgruntled crowd. I still believe that the majority had gathered for a protest rally and not an insurrection. Still, the violent uprising was not entirely unexpected for those of us who had been following the news stories or the rhetoric leading up to the gathering in D.C., and yet at the same time it seemed unimaginable in a country whose values are so counter to these actions.

As I saw images of many of the violent insurrectionists, I saw symbols of Christianity overlaid with politics and rage… and I was deeply saddened. It kept causing me to wonder why it is so hard for Christ's followers to continue to hear his admonishment to: “Put away your sword,” … “Those who use the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). It had me thinking about how in each of the Gospels one of the disciples pulled out his sword as the empires’ minions came to arrest what they saw as a political threat. “When those who were around Jesus saw what was coming, they asked, “Lord, should we strike with the sword?” Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, “No more of this!” and he touched his ear and healed him” (Luke 22:49–51). 

I wonder if Jesus anticipated this violent response to his arrest. Here was one of his followers who had been learning from Jesus about the power of God's love and grace who suddenly responded in a way that was antithetical to all of Jesus’ teachings. He must have had the sword with him all along… but had Jesus expected that these disciples had learned that it shouldn’t be used against another? In John’s Gospel we even hear this one with the sword named as Simon Peter, the rock upon whom Jesus would build the Church. It must have been a very sad moment when Jesus had to heal that ear and cry out “no more of this!” It must have felt like a teacher who suddenly has a sense that none of the class has understood the foundational lesson.

I heard the comments this week of R.P. Eddy, a former U.S. counterterrorism official and diplomat who now runs a private intelligence firm called Ergo, describe the “invisible obvious”. The idea is that there are things that sit right in front of us that we don't notice. "The reason that they are invisible to us ... gets to our biases." We can easily presume that those that look like us or outwardly hold some of our values should be okay, so we are surprised when they don’t act as we expect.

As we have seen repeatedly for months, among the masses of peaceful protestors crying for their voices to be heard, there have emerged those who would turn to violence and destruction. There is something about human nature that quickly labels those who are inciting violence as “them,” certainly not our team (whatever that may be). We’ve heard proclamations that have stirred outrage when in the midst of a White Supremacist demonstration in Charlotte there was the affirmation that “there are good people on both sides.” I have a hard time processing what a “good racist” might look like… but at some fundamental level, there is a proclamation that there are indeed good people on each side of every conflict, and sometimes those good people can end up engaged in very bad thoughts, words, and actions. This summer we watched the violence blamed on Black Lives Matter and Antifa, even as many of the investigations and arrests offered a much more complex view the ones who were responsible: White Supremacists, Antifa, local gangs, petty thieves, and that small minority of folks who seemed to think that destruction would serve their interests.

I remember so clearly when one of our members broke apart the word prejudice into those simple parts of pre-judging another and pointing out that this goes both ways, both choosing who should be alright as well as who should not. When the division gets deep, it should give us pause to examine how we are adding to the division.

From a spiritual perspective, I hear Jesus’ teaching to those disciples as he proclaims “no more” as also being a demand that they look within and examine the invisible obvious within our own hearts. This is the work of a confessional faith that is constantly demanding that we work to align our lives with the ways of a just and gracious God. Faithfulness is not self-serving or violent.

We are living in tense times as a nation. I am grieving that I have lost the ability to tell the story of a nation that trusts all the many faithful people involved in our complex process of elections enough to honor the elections – a nation that asks questions, recounts, even offers court challenges, and then that accepts the outcome.

I fear that what we saw on Epiphany was an illumination of the deep brokenness of a society. As your pastor, I have been profoundly aware that we have always been a congregation that strongly spans that political, theological, social spectrum, and that knows how to love and cherish those who think differently, vote differently, and live differently than ourselves. I have told the story far and wide of this little church called Peace that in this way manages to reflect the Kingdom. In this moment of time, I am desperately missing the buzz of coffee hour where the conversations may or may not touch on difference, but where we remember how we love and care about one another.

I have deep concerns about how we move forward with the love that is so desperately needed to heal our nation. How do we speak in ways that condemn violence in all its forms, that seeks to listen to, see, and honor the other as beloved of God? This could be hard work for us as we move forward, but we know how to do this. We know how to look at one another as beloved even as we stand in our differences. Even in this time when we are also held physically apart, remember who God calls us to be. Look within and seek out the invisible obvious to which each of us may need to attend as we choose Jesus’ way of transformative love. This is surely what God is calling us to in this moment. We begin a new year and a new chapter in our nation’s history, choose hope, and let us work together at being the body of Christ.

Shalom,

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