From the Pastor's Study - June/July 2021

I love coming across news stories that open my mind to new ways of seeing something. This morning it was the quick image of a new commode for NASA. The caption underneath it identified the toilet seat and the storage container that would convert urine to potable water… then there was a comment from an astronaut: “Yep, today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee.” Eeew! At the same time, it is mind bending to think that technology is moving toward the stuff that I remember reading in science fiction novels in high school (the book Dune).

This week also brought stories about China landing a rover on Mars. This happened just shortly after we landed a rover on Mars and even flew a drone in the thin atmosphere of the planet. Researchers keep talking about encountering signs of frozen water that may at some point have supported life. How many of us grew up with stories imagining life on Mars and what it might mean? Then another story really piqued my curiosity, and this one was right here on earth. I was reading about researchers applying computer processing power and language learning software to listen to the communication of whales to try to decode their language. As researchers understand the whales’ language, the next step will be to try to communicate with them directly… it’s hard to imagine. But the comment that really caught my attention in the interview with the researchers was that they had all discussed the importance of listening to what the whales might have to say to them. They needed to agree that if they learned how to communicate with whales, then they would have to be willing to hear what these largest brained animals on earth might have to tell us, no matter how critical or unexpected. A willingness to hear the perspective from another species is a truly humbling notion. Imagine a 200-year-old bowhead whale being able to offer a perspective on how our world and our planet has changed and how they may perceive our role in those changes. What could we learn? Would we be willing to hear and try to grow as a result of the insights? Or would we simply double down on our own perspective and dismiss anything that was an unwelcome word, or a word that challenged our already defined perspectives?

The story of our faith often casts a vision of what might be, of how God's vision of the world might be very different from ours. I think of that simple line from the book of Revelation 21:1: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth” that echoes the last verses of the book of Isaiah. In each case, the vision is of a world that realigns itself with God's ways instead of the destructive and self-serving ways of the world. That poetry and those visions emerge out of times of weariness and oppression. At their heart, each of them pleaded with the faithful to be open to seeing with new eyes.

I have spoken often in the last year about the experience of living through this pandemic as placing us in a liminal time, a time that exists between the departure from the old normal but before our arrival into the next normal. In that space there is the challenge of naming what has not worked before, and of what we long for in the next space. There is an opportunity to listen for what new and surprising insights or wisdom might emerge. And there is a necessity in the attentiveness for patience to learn how that which is beyond ourselves will unfold and invite us into new possibilities.

For years there have been conversations in The Church about all that has been changing and how it seems that there is another reformation before us. Many in the church see a pattern of the church needing to re-imagine and re-form every 500 years. Whether we were ready for that or not, it seems that this global pandemic has awakened a host of questions of justice, equity, relevance, and vitality for the future of The Church and for our local congregation.

We regularly pray “thy kingdom come.” As we pray, we should be doing so with a longing that we could see our world as God sees it… to imagine that new heaven and new earth. But then again, would we really want to see the world that way if it meant that something would need to change in our lives, in our world, in how we embody the faith as a church?

My prayer is that together we might cultivate the curiosity to imagine beyond what we have always known. Maybe it is in the midst of summertime’s long days, or in some other liminal glimmer of different visions that we hear God's voice leading us forward into tomorrow. Our church and our nation are poised in anticipation of the possibility of reopening to a new or next normal.

As we draw close will we be willing to be bold in our imagining, hungry in our curiosity, and open to see beyond our known past toward tomorrow’s coffee or the insights of a whale?

We are called to look, listen, and discern together where God is calling us.

May God bless us abundantly on our common journey,

Pastor Eric

From the Pastor's Study - May 2021

“Are we there yet?” Those simple words have been running through my mind this morning — sometimes mocking, sometimes serious, crop up on any long road-trip. This morning they propelled me back to the long drives across country that were a part of every summer during my childhood. Growing up in Chicagoland with grandparents in the Boston and Denver areas meant that there were lots of journeys across long, seemingly endless states. At some point, I remember a cassette tape deck being added to the journey. For as long as its batteries held out, it sat at the ready on the front seat between my parents. What I remember was that one of the favorite responses to our antsyness was Frank Sinatra crooning “High Hopes” – “…everyone knows an ant can’t move a rubber tree plant! But he had high hopes… he had high hopes… he had high apple pie in the sky hopes…” A family singing in a hot car plying across the endless plains of Nebraska was somehow re-oriented to the possibility instead of just the present frustration. Somehow, I think that all of that travelling as a kid, and maybe the introduction of perspective re-orienting distractions, helped me to fall in love with the idea of the journey having value and not just the destination.

This year has been a journey, and it has exhausted most of us as we’ve waited for the destination of normalcy – “are we there yet?!?” These are good moments to remember that God journeys with us. Faith and grace are not destinations, but an orientation to a persistent, patient God who seems to love journeys. For God, those journeys are how God has always shaped God's people into a different way of seeing their lives and our world. And of course, it doesn’t take much pondering of the stories of scripture to remember that God's people have struggled and whined repeatedly and sometimes it has seemed like the cassette-deck-of-reorienting-inspiration has run out of battery power. But God keeps moving forward with us, hoping that we’ll come to cherish the blessings of the journey.

We are in the midst of the Easter Season – another time when God's people are invited to contemplate how the triumph of the good news has touched the world, past, present, and future. The season challenges us to be engaged with being kindlers of God's light in the world, and bearers of God's high hopes for all of creation. That’s incredibly good news, but it’s also hard work. We continue to live in a world that feels deeply divided. Politics, race, and even how we navigate a pandemic have each become painful reminders of how easy it is to let frustration and impatience overwhelm the perspective of the journey. I recently heard someone speak what used to be a more familiar phrase: “in my family growing up, we didn’t see race…” and I was struck with a new sadness. There was a time that we put on a band-aid and thought that the best thing would be if we just didn’t see difference. What we know is that this is only comfortable if you happen to be one of the people who has always felt seen. Our faith proclaims that each of us is created in the image of God. Our faith proclaims repeatedly that God's love and salvation is intended for all the earth. Yet sadly, instead of looking at a diverse landscape of humanity as an invitation to more fully understand the height and depth and breadth and diversity of God's love, we sell out to a more comfortable vision of homogenized unity.

We just heard the verdict in the George Floyd trial. Many have spoken of this as a pivotal moment for many in our world. Others have been rightly frustrated with that assessment as they note that had this been a white man, we would have expected nothing else. Even that deep division of perspective speaks to the continued challenge for us to work to understand and honor one another through trying to recognize the very different life experiences that people have. Jesus’ prayer for unity doesn’t come about by everyone holding hands and singing kumbaya as an affirmation that we’re all the same, but rather by joining hands and celebrating that we are united in being equally valued, equally seen, equally cherished icons through which to see the face of God.

The journey we are on is one that will be long and arduous. Two of the pandemics that we face, Covid-19 and racism, aren’t going to disappear quickly. We can whine and get frustrated and keep asking “aren’t we there yet?!” or we can open our hearts’ minds and see what we might learn along the way. How might both of these struggles invite us to see and love our neighbor more deeply? How can the diversity of people and ideas become a chance to celebrate how great and vast is the love of our God? One of the things that I’ve cherished about our congregation is one of the same things that I now feel as a division, and that is the diversity of politics and theology within our church family. We have a chance to do the work to grow. We have the chance to expand our vision of God through all of the differences among us and around us… or we have the chance to limit God to our own perspectives and our own self certainties. When we learn to embrace the journey — maybe even trying to love the change of rhythm — a long journey may even become a pilgrimage of the soul. There is much for us to see and to learn together.

Just a year ago I turned to these words from First Peter: "Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that you may be exalted in due time. Cast all your anxieties on God, because God cares for you. […] Steadfast in your faith, know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kind of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who calls you to eternal glory, will restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To God be the power forever and ever. Amen." (1 Peter 5:6-7 & 9-11) As we continue to lean into this Easter Season may we find the light of God beckoning us to have high hopes and to keep growing.

May God bless us,

Pastor Eric

From the Pastor's Study - April 2021

It is hard to see stories that we know well with new eyes. Each year as we approach the beloved stories of our holidays, I try to take on the challenge to listen for what I haven’t heard, to see what I haven’t seen, and to let the old, old story have new life. That always means being willing to stretch and grow. The other day I was reading the introduction to a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a profound thinker and theologian. There were a couple of phrases that jumped off the page at me as I read. Heschel’s daughter (also a theologian) wrote in the introduction how she remembered her father often saying: “God begins where words end.” She then recalled an idea and phrase that her father loved that shows up frequently in scripture: “the beginning of wisdom is awe of God.”

Heschel is one of those theologians who speaks from a place of great depth. Like many of his generation’s prophets, early in his career his life was shaped by the rise of Antisemitism and Nazism. As he was abroad trying to secure visas for his family to emigrate with him to the United States (where he had received a teaching position at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati), WWII broke out and the rest of his family became victims of Germany’s murderous Holocaust. Out of that tragedy and loss, Heschel’s writings have always touched me through his powerful vision of a God longing to be in relationship with humanity. He intones words of awe, words that try to step out of their own way to make space for God's presence to claim us anew. He nurtures a relationship with God that moves beyond the words of the familiar story into transformative awe.

We are entering a second Holy Week that is being shaped by the pandemic. We are all carrying a weariness and grief in our souls from all the changes that we have experienced in the last year. We are longing for the return to something that we remember as being so much better and easier and more fulfilling than this present reality… and many among us are becoming impatient. That swirl of emotions may be as powerful a platform as we could be given for us to hear anew the witness of Holy Week. The whole story of our faith is one of moving beyond our expectations and beyond our narrow visions into that place where we might be startled by awe.

Hear again that journey through fresh ears shaped by our current reality: Palm Sunday’s proclamations ring out with a people who are longing for the restoration of Israel. They are hoping to feel in their souls once again God's claim of them as the chosen people. They want to feel remembered as they struggle and complain under a continued Roman occupation. They struggle to see anything positive coming from those who are in power, instead focusing only on a narrative of victimization and oppression. There is even the sentiment that they are willing to rise up in opposition if Jesus just says the word and leads them. That is a narrative that has been familiar throughout history, the story of armed conflict and revolution, the story of might-makes-right, or power over another defines the victor.

Can you hear our story overlaid on that? Consider politics, or religion, or responses to the pandemic, and we can hear lots of language and positions that echo the expectations of the crowds on Palm Sunday. Now stop and listen! The relationship to which God calls us always defies those expectations and pushes us beyond this expected narrative. By Maundy Thursday, we are remembering a new commandment that is offered even in the midst of a story of betrayal – Jesus commands those who would follow him to serve one another and to love one another as Jesus has loved them. It is a command that is easy to skip over until you hear it in a conflicted world. Heschel came out of the despair of the Holocaust to be active in civil rights and anti-war activities with a depth of compassion that responded to an invitation to relationship with God instead of bitterness or resentment. How do we hear that call this year when so much would divide us? Are we willing to gather at Jesus’ table and get out of our own way so that we might be able to love beyond the framework of our expectations or certainties?

Of course, our story continues and by Good Friday our story is one that struggles with grief and the remembering that in the moment of Jesus’ crucifixion and death it seemed like injustice and violence had won. In that moment, their savior and the antidote to the oppression of the world, offered forgiveness and grace from the cross instead of any words of uprising or revolt. The story sounds outrageous if we place ourselves at the foot of the cross with our hope shattered. Perhaps some of the people gathered remember those teachings of Jesus that promised a new future, but my guess is that most of them were tired of people telling them to be patient. Why should they have hope when it looked like nothing had changed? I listen in this moment in time to those who are tired of all that this last year has meant and I hear those same echoes - hope is spoken of but still unrealized. Patience is in as short supply as toilet paper was a year ago. At that cross this year we all are carrying an abundance of grief… but are we listening for the awe? How many heard the Prince of Peace uttering those absurd words of forgiveness in the midst of his looking like he was giving in to the torture of a government that they opposed? Can we hear beyond the words?

Perhaps if we can hear the ways that our story is woven into Holy Week’s confused expectations, if we can lean into the uncomfortable demands, and awkward commands to love beyond what seems possible, if we can stand firm and not change direction or give up hope in the power of forgiveness and commitment to compassion, then maybe we can open ourselves to be touched by the awe of Easter. We are moving again toward that proclamation that God's love wins. Always. This is the message that was startling in the first century and that should still startle. Easter is the climax to a story that should leave us still wondering how we could have missed all the clues… Of course, we are so familiar with that story that we can too easily fail to do anything but hear the words. Our familiarity can prevent us from being struck by the awe that is beckoning to us from all around us.

Holy Week and Easter will look different again this year – but they have always looked different to those who are willing to see with new eyes and to allow themselves to be caught unexpectedly by a moment of awe. This has been a year… and woven into it have been lots of signs of love, hope, and promise in amidst all the struggles. May God bless each of us with the courage to open our hearts and let God's love startle us in some unexpected way this season. Perhaps God does begin where words end…

From the Pastor's Study - March 2021

Little could we have imagined how much our world could change for the course of a year. Just a year ago we were entering into Lent anticipating again that embarkation for a journey into deeper relationship with God. We remember how the church created this period of 40 days prior to Easter as a time of preparation for hearing and receiving that death-shattering good news. We remember how this time was structured to parallel Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness and all of those other 40-day (and year) periods in scripture when God's people would be challenged to grow into the people who God intended them to be. Could any of us a year ago have imagined how the mention of toilet-paper shortages would bring a knowing nod? Could any of us have imagined that we would be carrying the weight of over a half a million deaths from the pandemic in our country alone, in less than a year? It is easy to grow numb as we wander in the wilderness. Or could any of us have imagined that we would holding an Ash Wednesday drive-through ashes, communion, and chili supper? It continues to be quite a year!

I would like to think that, even during the exhaustion, this year has offered us lots of opportunities to deepen our faith journey. This season of Lent would be a good time to reflect on that perspective as a guide for how we might draw closer to God.

Often in Lent I have heard people talk about what they will “give up.” This is a response to that wilderness experience of Jesus when after forty days it says that he was famished. This has been translated by the church into such things as fast days and giving up flesh meat during Lent (for some this included even dairy and eggs). At some point in history, we see fish allowed — a practice that some connect back to a concern for the fishing economy, while others connect the fish back to it being a simple pauper’s food. Of course, many of us now look to eating fish not as a hardship but a treat — the opposite of a fast. Always, the concern of fast days and dietary laws is to focus our attention and our prayer life on God and our faith. So, if fish-fry does that for you, go for it! But if not, then perhaps there are other ways to create reminders that reorient your life to God's ways. In a year in which so much has been taken away already, I would encourage the Lenten discipline of adding an expression of God's grace rather than subtracting one more thing. What small thing happens for you every day or every week that you could use as a reminder to practice the prayer discipline of generously sharing in God's grace. Perhaps it is stopping before you take your first sip of coffee to set aside an offering for charity, or a prayer for peace for the world, or love for your enemies? Is it a new discipline that when you do your laundry, you consider what emotions you are carrying that you need to let God's love flow over and wash away? Perhaps we need to choose what we could add to our daily discipline in this season that would nurture our souls. 

Last year I shared a prayer from The Iona Community in Scotland that I read again this year with very different eyes:

You keep us waiting. You, the God of all time, want us to wait for the right time in which to discover who we are, where we must go, who will be with us, and what we must do. So, thank you…for the waiting time.

You keep us looking. You, the God of all space, want us to look in the right and wrong places for signs of hope, for people who are hopeless, for visions of a better world that will appear among the disappointments of the world we know. So, thank you…for the looking time.

 You keep us loving. You, the God whose name is love, want us to be like you – to love the loveless and the unlovely and the unlovable; to love without jealousy or design or threat, and most difficult of all, to love ourselves. So, thank you…for the loving time.

 And in all this you keep us, through hard questions with no easy answers; through failing where we hoped to succeed and making an impact when we felt useless; through the patience and the dreams and the love of others; and through Jesus Christ and his Spirit, you keep us.

So thank you… for the keeping time, and for now, and for ever. Amen

We know that God journeys with us in love and invites us to be servants of that gift. May God bless us again with a hunger to live God's love and ways in this Lenten season,