From the Pastor's Study - October 2021

A smile filled my insides as I saw a little boy with a backpack as large as he was standing on the street corner waiting for the Monday morning school bus to pick him up. His body language seemed to spark with that eager energy of heading to school on his own. The joy seemed to ripple off his little patient foot-shuffling. Every now and again, his glance confirmed that he knew that just across the street his parent was watching from the garage. It’s been a lot of years since Laura and I were watching our children venture off toward those first days of school. It’s been so many years of memories since then. We’ve watched not only our children growing up, but also each of those special exchange students who we were blessed to welcome into our family. The house is quieter this fall, having now entered into the realm of empty-nesters. We’re new at the journey, but have been blessed to watch many in our church family survive and even thrive before us in this transition. And like with each change on our life’s journey, in those moments when I may feel anxious, or excited, or nervous, I know that God is right there watching like that parent across the street… never far away, encouraging from a safe distance.

Life transitions and children’s faces seem like wonderful places to remember a core message of God: that we are beloved, each of us wondrous. The greatest gift that I’ve found in life are those connections with people along the journey. A moment with a shared smile, or a lifetime of shared love and commitment, each offer the blessing of God inviting us toward seeing the world differently. This fall I am once again involved in a musical, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, with our community theater group. I entered that process with a certain amount of trepidation with a cast of mostly unvaccinated children, singing and dancing our way through regular rehearsals. I’ve been grateful that initially most of our rehearsing has been outdoors in the park. I been still more grateful for the role that I was given as The Doctor. Each rehearsal I get to sing about how every child, every life, is miraculous – a wonder. Then as I watch the rest of the cast performing their song and dance my proclamation is overwhelmingly confirmed! It hasn’t felt the same to be on stage without my daughters or exchange-student daughters. But as the show is coming together, I’m beaming with a reflection of that same pride and love for each of the children present in the production… every child is awesomely and wondrously made (as Psalm 139 says).  With the resumption of Sunday School, and the reemergence of a middle school youth group, that same emotion keeps welling up within me as I watch and pray for each person involved. Like so many people, I am aware of how parched my soul has been for the regathering of community. But even more poignantly, I’ve been longing for experiences of community working together to celebrate and care for one another – understanding that our stories are always interdependent.

Scripture speaks over and over again about that love for one another as intertwined with our love for God. As the Apostle Paul writes to churches struggling with division and all manner of difficulties he invariably turns back to the tool of love as being what will heal them and align them with God's ways. Judgement exists as a thread that runs through those texts as well, but so often the judgement is linked to placing ourselves ahead of the love of others, or the commitment to value every part of the community, every person, as miraculous, a wonder, a reflection of God. We are continuing as a nation, and as a world, in a time when it seems like there are lots of forces trying to produce division. In that chaos I keep praying that we can stop to see the child, see the faces, and take the next small step on the journey knowing that God is right there watching and inviting us to see a different way.

May God guide us in Love,

Pastor Eric

From the Pastor's Study - September 2021

The September Tidings letter has always anticipated the fall program year and that regathering of the body of Christ in a somewhat more regular rhythm than what the summer offers. This year I find myself looking to the fall with the great hope that we will be able to regather in increasingly normal ways after a period of time much greater than just a summertime. As I write this article, I continue to be aware that all of our plans continue to be contingent on factors of which we are not fully in control – namely an ongoing pandemic. Every school is putting out their guidance and their plan for how to navigate this year in a way that will hopefully be more normal than the last year and a half. Churches are navigating the same journey, some guided strictly by fear, some guided by what they are calling faithfulness, but which sometimes looks more like bravado. At Peace UCC we are continuing to try to navigate this journey with the humility of only knowing what we know and trying to continue to lead in love and care for all of our members and our community. And I know that we are not managing to please everyone.

There is a common theme that I hear in conversations and that I feel in my own heart, and that is exhaustion and longing. Our healthcare systems speak of doctors and nurses experiencing PTSD-like symptoms as the health crisis that we had hoped was behind us is once again exerting a strain on the system. I imagine that for teachers and business owners there is that nagging concern that we don’t want to go backward… for the church we share that concern, and we share that longing to get back to normal.

Through the last year I have been regularly drawn to the story of the Exodus and of the Exile. Our story of faith holds deep wisdom for those who are frustrated and just want to get back to a more predictable existence. Interestingly, our story at no point simply suggests that God's people get to just go back to the way it was, nor does the story suggest that restoration happens quickly. God's people are always reminded that our journeys unfold in God's time – a euphemism for “get ready to practice patience.”

But the other thing that God keeps challenging the people to practice in the midst of adversity is a different way of living for themselves and in relation to others. This month the word ubuntu has been running through my mind. This philosophy that comes out of the Bantu-speaking cultures of Africa captured the imaginations of many people some years ago with definitions of the ubuntu as being something like “I am because we are.” At its core, this African philosophical system speaks of all of us being interconnected and finding our humanness in that interconnection. Letseka and Venter speak about how Ubuntu refers to the interconnected-ness between human beings which reminds one of the isiXhosa proverb Intaka yakha ngoboya benye, "A bird builds its nest with the feathers of other birds."[1] That sense of interconnection is at the heart of God's narrative for God's people. And in this moment in time, it feels like that interconnection is desperately lacking in our society and in our world. But that’s nothing new. In that period of exodus and exile it is a common theme for God's people to whine about what they want, what they need, instead of looking around and claiming the strength of possibility of being woven together into the fabric of God.

In Isaiah 58 the people “Cry with full throat, without restraint” with a lament that they hope will urge God to restore them to the ways things had been. Here are the people at the end of the Babylonian exile, longing for their return to Jerusalem and they just want God to make everything the way that it was. They practice the fasting that had been their way to get God's attention and they just want everything to change. And then they’re frustrated: “Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?” The people are practicing their faith expecting God to take notice, and what they get in return is God admonishing them for their selfish behavior. The people are crying out to God for relief and return to a past that they remember as glorious while failing to place the needs of others before their own. God calls them to something more like that ubuntu philosophy. In Isaiah 58:6 God declares “No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help. Then your salvation will come like the dawn, and your wounds will quickly heal. Your godliness will lead you forward, and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind. Then when you call, the Lord will answer. ‘Yes, I am here,’ he will quickly reply…”

We are living during an exhausting time, and perhaps most exhausting of all is the deep divisions that are being fueled at every turn. We have had an extraordinary opportunity to come out of a global crisis stronger and more unified as a people who have looked to care for their neighbor, to consider how they might place their neighbor’s health and strength and wellbeing as important as their own. I am because we are… We have had that opportunity, but like God's people in the past we desperately struggle to get out of our own way.

My prayer is that this fall we will get to celebrate a choir returning to worship, that we will manage to keep singing and gathering in greater numbers, that our Faith Formation classes (Sunday School, Confirmation, Adult Ed.) will be in person, that we will keep sharing fellowship and keep moving forward as a congregation with the strength and care that has been our hallmark. I believe that we can do this if we all work together, if we humbly embrace a little ubuntu philosophy, if we hear those words of Isaiah spoken to a people filled with longing to return from so long ago. God has shown us what it looks like to heal the divisions in our world and to hear God's cry “Yes, I am here.” It always starts with that simple command to love God and to love one another.

I have great hope for us, and I have faith that God is far from done with shaping us into a glorious tapestry of God's people, but I am also humbled that it looks like we all have a long and arduous journey of healing our hearts and souls ahead of us, rebuilding our relationship with one another and with God.

May God bless us on the journey,

Pastor Eric

[1] Letseka, MM & Venter, E 2012. "How Student Teachers understand African Philosophy", Koers - Bulletin for Christian Scholarship 77(1):1-8.

From the Pastor's Study - August 2021

In just a couple of weeks a very small group of us will be heading north for a shortened week of wilderness canoeing. We’ve begun describing the trip as the “almost Canada” canoe trip – we’ll be going into the Boundary Waters, a reminder of yet one more change caused by our world’s current challenge of trying to navigate the best path forward in a continuing pandemic. We have been grieving our inability to embark on the trip to Canada due to border restrictions. We are grieving as we encounter the changes in outfitter, and menu, and restrictions for travel. At some point along our journey, we may be almost close enough to see Canada… but we won’t get there this year. We are reminded that we are still journeying in that liminal space. 

I have found myself repeatedly being drawn to the story of the Exodus as we’ve navigated the challenges of the last couple of years. The narrative can touch our journey of faith in lots of different ways – the theme that I keep hearing is that of moving from a people who are enslaved to the life-sucking-ways of being brick builders for Pharaoh, into being shaped into a people who are freed in order that they might learn to follow and serve God. That call to a different life orientation is at the heart of our story of faith. That call also constantly becomes one of the greatest challenges for any us as we journey with God. Like the Israelites, we are quick to proclaim the vision and value of freedom, but we are slow to embrace a vision that is about freedom for a path in service to something greater than ourselves and not merely freedom from a circumstance that we don’t like. It’s very easy to grieve change and complain about all the things that we don’t like or don’t have. It’s much harder to turn to God and give thanks for what we do have and to keep our focus on the direction toward which God is leading us.  

On that Exodus journey the people keep looking back and they keep grumbling and they keep doubting that they will arrive in the promised land. Indeed, their lack of faith, and their inability to work together with one another and with God at one point leads God to that proclamation in Number 14:11 that reads: “The Lord said to Moses, “How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have performed among them?” God wants to wipe the slate clean and start over… but Moses convinces God not to give up on God's people. Perhaps you remember God's compromise, that the people would wander in the wilderness for forty years before arriving in that promised land. The people needed a generation to learn to work together and to trust in God... and even then it was often a struggle. 

We are living amid a world that I think God might judge in very similar fashion to that whining, selfish generation in the wilderness. There’s a desperate need for us to pull together, to work together, that we might choose to make meaning and strengthen our relationships with one another and with God during our wilderness journey. But that requires choosing a constructive attitude at every step along the way. 

We’re going to head into the wilderness with our little group, and I’m sure that there will be plenty of opportunities for us to whine about how our experience won’t be like what we’ve had in the past… or, we can choose to encourage one another to celebrate a long awaited chance to engage God's creation with one another. We can choose to let our time and our journey feed our souls and deepen our relationship with God. Every time that we do something as a group we are reminded of how much more fun, powerful, and rewarding it is when we work together.  

Around church lots of things are becoming re-energized. We are making plans for things like VBS, Sunday School, a Pignic, the Chancel Choir, Confirmation, Adult Faith Formation opportunities, and a Children’s Christmas program all to be unfolding in the next few months. Even as we return to soul-feeding opportunities that seem familiar, they will be different. Lots of activities may shift their times in the schedule. One of the things that many of you have noted is that a year ago when we were worshipping in the park on the first Sunday of each month that Communion shifted to the first Sunday instead of the last. By the end of the summer, we were talking about how much sense it made to align ourselves with most of the rest of our denomination and continue celebrating Communion on the first Sunday of the month. And so, we’ll continue with that new schedule for the future.  

My deep prayer is that as we continue this journey together, we all remember the power of working together. I also pray that we keep reminding ourselves and one another that our faith is about moving forward, and it is about humbling ourselves in loving God and loving our neighbor first and foremost. We are called to responsibility to all of God's people and creation. As a people of God, I pray that we can keep pulling together to bear witness to that freedom for which God has called us: the freedom to love like Jesus.  

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