From the Pastor's Study - February 2023

 “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” (Psalm 127:1, NIV)

We’ve written that verse so often on the walls of homes that we have built with Habitat for Humanity. I’ve just returned from a Habitat trip to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was the first trip that we’ve managed to send forth since just before the pandemic. It felt really good to once again be engaged in this ministry that has had so much importance to our congregation for so long. As we struggled to get three young adults who were able to join us for the week, we were quickly remembering the trips when youth, young adult, and adult teams would each go out with a dozen instead of a handful. It’s easy to look back at some time gone by and wistfully remember and become distracted from seeing how our God is a God who is active yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our little group was amazing: in the work they did, in the witness that they offered to those around them, in the ways that they cared for one another as a model of beloved community. The experience was that longed-for reminder that God is at work in the here and now with the tools and people at hand. It’s the reminder to keep refocusing on how God is at work in this moment. That is and has always been the work of God's faithful, and it's often been hard work. I think of the Israelites in the wilderness complaining about what they’d left behind in Egypt – garlic, flesh-pots – somehow forgetting the part of the story that they were also stuck in a reality of slavery that was less than desirable.

We are invited to be laborers with this God all the time. We are reminded to look at the work we are doing and to ask how it is that we see God at work guiding the ministries in which we engage. Since the last newsletter, we’ve begun our monthly free community meals with some indication that momentum may grow. We’ve heard from members of the congregation celebrating the chance to gather and we’ve watched as new faces from the community have come in to find the love of God freely shared in food, hospitality, spirit. We saw familiar faces return for the holidays, even as we grieved not seeing others whose presence we’ve longed for. We’ve encountered blessings and God's mercy revealing itself among us in so many different ways. The path forward never seems to be quite what we’d expect, but it’s good.

When last I wrote, I was sharing about our German exchange pastor joining us at the beginning of the year. Well, as yet another reminder of our strained immigration system, we are now hoping that all of the hurdles for his visa will have been cleared for him to be able to arrive at the beginning of March. Once he joins us, we will have the blessing of sharing in ministry with him for 12 months. I would have hoped that the time had already begun… but God is also in the waiting, and God will be in the arriving.

Soon we will reenter the season of Lent. We’ll turn again to Holden Evening Prayer, but now with an added personal connection of having Berit working at Holden Village for the year. As we gather for Ash Wednesday, Laura and I will have just returned from that retreat community in the Cascade mountains with new visions of the place that birthed this beloved musical setting of vespers. As we continue through Lent we’ll be hearing from this year’s confirmands with their insights and wisdom.

At each step along the way we are invited to pause and look for where God is leading us. And we are to remember that the path isn’t supposed to be merely of our own creation but rather the one which God is building, for otherwise it will all be in vain. May God bless us each in celebrating this day and all that God is doing with us and through us. Shalom,

Pastor Eric

From the Pastor's Study - December 2022-January 2023

Ready or not, here it comes! Most years the race toward Christmas sneaks up on me just as I am settling in to enjoy fall. This year is no different. We are graced with the second snow of the year - that first one was so amazing coating the leaves while they still hung on the trees, and now the beauty of this day is snow clinging resiliently to the branches. Ready or not… This year, to fit in all of the lessons for Sunday School, they began talking about the arrival of the Magi two weeks before Thanksgiving, and we all got to hear about it in the children’s sermon with an Aussie camel guest. Here it comes… Each year, as I am startled by the season and unprepared for the rapid approach of the holidays, I’m reminded of how God's story is always supposed to be startling.

As a child, I think I heard the Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany stories as wondrous, but I’m pretty sure I never thought of them as startling. The tale of a little child born in a manger always evokes that warm cozy feel-good story that is cloaked in candlelight services and singing “Silent Night.” Those are wonderful experiences of the wonder of God choosing us. Still, what I’ve come to so clearly understand as the years have gone on is that the tenderness of God arriving in that unexpected infant-package in Bethlehem so long ago is also a radical proclamation of a totally different way of being in the world. Jesus’ birth sets in motion a wild cascade of events that ought to challenge everything that we see in the world. Jesus was declaring that the way the world valued people and related to God wasn’t aligned to God’s values. He kept not only teaching but also living a way of love that really upset the status-quo. It challenged the ways that people had always done things before. Instead of focusing on power and institutions, Jesus focused on people and healing. Instead of focusing on amassing wealth or prestige, Jesus kept offering examples of humility and generosity. It’s a crazy idea — an idea today often gets dismissed as socialist, or anti-American, or impractical, or who knows what. But this was the startling way of Jesus’ birth and life. It was as though he was crying out the world “wake up!” with every fiber in his being. Be awake to the ways that God's love and truth and grace are to be lived as gifts instead of held onto as limited possessions which some chosen few have deservedly received.

Marty Haugen in his 1983 hymn proclaims:

Awake! Awake and greet the new morn,
for angels herald its dawning.
sing out your joy, for Jesus is born,
behold! the Child of our longing.
Come as a baby weak and poor,
to bring all hearts together,
to open wide the heavenly door,
and lives now inside us forever.

Each year I pray that God’s choosing to be born among us breaks us open in new ways so that we will never be the same. Every pregnancy and birth touches the family involved in indelible ways — Jesus' entry into the world should be no different. But the changes that Jesus offers seek to introduce us to a different way of relating to God- and that is rooted in a thousand small decisions that would place God's love, and not the ways of the world, first. We still choose between the kingdom of God that we pray for, and the kingdom of Caesar into which Jesus was born.

How do we encourage love and generosity to change our lives? God wants us awake to greet the new morn with every moment of every day – to see how our choices impact for good or for ill, for benefit or detriment. We are to wake up and see the world through fresh eyes filled with God's wonder and revelation.

This January we will have the opportunity to welcome into our congregation for the year a fresh voice and new perspective in ministry. We will be welcoming a German pastor, Jakob, who will be serving a Vicariate year (an internship year) with us. I’m looking forward to a different theological training and a different perspective. I’m looking very forward to seeing how another minister in our midst might encourage each of us to be startled with new insights about how God's love is at work among us. Of course, I’ve always delighted in seeing you as a congregation so beautifully embody God's love in welcoming, supporting, and encouraging those among us to serve God. In many ways, “ready or not,” we will have another experience and person shaping the next chapter in the story of Peace Church.

Ready or not, here it comes — a holiday season, a new year, a new adventure in which we are always invited to see God embodied in all that surrounds us.

God bless us!  

From the Pastor's Study - November 2022

This last weekend the leaves were reaching spectacular colors, the days were shortening, and we were being assured that fall is finally upon us. I looked at a particularly beautiful tree, and the artist in me delighted at the incredible variety of colors and the depths of textures that one tree can contain. It reminded me of a lesson about leaves from my college days: an art professor held up a leaf and invited us to talk about its symmetry. Leaves are perfectly balanced from one side to the other but are never perfectly symmetrical. The lesson then moved on to people, the two sides of our face, our bodies, our hands, or feet, are typically balanced but never identical. That tree and the lesson it recalled. reminded me that the gift and beauty of diversity and balance are important lessons for us to learn from creation itself.

Last Monday was celebrated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and/or Columbus Day. We live in a world that seems to see only the possibility of one story negating the other instead of helping to balance the other. Extremism has made much of beauty and insight that comes of difference and balance indiscernible. As a child I was fascinated by the story of Christopher Columbus and his spirit of adventure and commitment to challenging unpopular theories of his day to prove the world was round. It was only years later that I would learn that lots of people in Columbus’ day already thought that the world was round, and even had a sense of its scale. His motivation was power and wealth as he sought a more efficient route for the spice trade which ended up with him lost in Central America. It was still later that I would learn of the horrors of how he treated the Indigenous peoples of the island “Hispaniola” (what would become Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and the peoples of the newly conquered Americas. I cannot forget the image from murals in the Haitian National Museum of people holding the stumps of their arms after having had their hands chopped off at the command of Columbus for having not embraced Jesus Christ. It was unclear if they’d even understood what they were being asked. Some have tried to excuse the atrocities against Indigenous peoples as the product of thinking from a different age when Indigenous peoples (and later Africans) were not even seen as being human. This idea was further supported by the Doctrine of Discovery which was embraced by much of the church. Sadly, there are lots of texts from the age of discovery and conquest which make it quite clear that there were also many within the church and the science of the day who did not hold to the convenient truth that some people were human and others lesser animals. We keep learning only if we’re willing to see and grow. Recently someone shared a quote from social media that is attributed to Cherokee Elder Stan Rushworth. “The difference between a Western settler mindset of, I have rights and an Indigenous mindset of I have an obligation… Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I was born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.” The quote points to a different way of living than that held by the age of discovery and conquest. It actually points to the very lessons that many within the church would have been trying to teach Columbus as well- that we are inheritors of the blessings of God and all of creation, and we are called to be stewards of all. These are lessons that our thanksgiving story imagines weaving into one another. The idea that exploration and curiosity, that seeking a better future for oneself and one’s family might intersect with learning to care for past, present, and future generations, as well as the planet, is something worth considering. Two sides of a leaf, two sides of our faces, or our hearts… And both sides of any story only become richer and stronger when we are also able to critique the things that are not blessings, that were not faithful.

We are entering a season of Thanksgiving as well as the perpetual season of political campaigning – not to mention the steady encouragement to unbridled consumerism. How do we learn to stop, to celebrate the diversity, the depth of color and texture, the wonder of balance with which God has crafted the universe… How do we learn to open our hearts to see beyond our certainties to knowledge which may give us the opportunity for growth?

Our journey of faith is always one of learning and growing, looking for new opportunities and age-old wisdom and how one might help to support the other. Perhaps we do well to respond more often with curiosity than certainty, with awe rather than ambivalence, and above all to keep trying to grow in our capacity to love like Jesus in all matters.

Shalom, Pastor Eric

October 2022

From the Pastor’s Study

“Look there she goes, the girl is so peculiar

I wonder if she's feeling well

With a dreamy, far-off look

And her nose stuck in a book

What a puzzle to the rest of us is Belle”

For the last month and a half these have been some of the lines from “Beauty and the Beast” that I have sung over and over again. As fall is whispering of its arrival, I am once again spending lots of time rehearsing with the community theater company that I’ve been a part of for the last dozen years. Each year as I learn the show I can’t help but see all of the ways that nearly every story offers a reflection of our sacred story. Perhaps it’s because most stories include themes of good conquering evil, or people learning to see beyond their preconceived notions, or people growing in their understanding of themselves. Each of these themes that you’ll find in nearly every novel, movie, play, or work of art, have the capacity to offer glimmers of humanity’s journey with the divine.

This year I find myself enthralled in a fairytale that offers the same insights. In this story there once was a prince — or as the gospels would say, “a rich man” — who refused to see a beggar who came looking for aid. His failure to see with eyes of compassion caused him to suffer the curse of turning into a beast externally which may have mirrored the inner ugliness that his wealth had nurtured. The rest of the story emphasizes everyone needing to look beyond the obvious, to look at beauty and value within instead of merely judging a book by its cover. That’s the very journey that Jesus invites us into again and again. We are invited to see the power of love to transform our lives and the world. We are invited to see the world through God's eyes instead of the limits of the world. Mother Teresa said: “Only in heaven will we learn how much we owe the poor for helping us to love God.” That’s not merely a fairytale, that’s a window into the way that God works with us by breaking open our vision of what beauty and love and grace look like.

God keeps calling us to look at the world through new eyes and imagine what is possible. I would be thrilled if the reputation that we had within our community and the world was that we were a little odd, peculiar even, in the ways that we live out our faith and share God's love. I’ve loved the UCC’s use of the word “extravagant” when we talk of how we are to live our faith: extravagant welcome, extravagant love, extravagant grace. There’s something about that which suggests that we should always love a little more, go a little farther, live a little more generously, and to do all of that because that’s how Jesus loved the world and teaches us to do the same. My hope is that as the seasons change and the church year continues to ramp up in its activities, we are inspired to notice all of the wondrous stories around us speaking of God's abundance and our invitation to see and share.

This last Sunday, the children were starting to return to a revamped Sunday School program that holds great promise (though it will also be a work in progress for a bit). During the week I heard the choir returning to practice and lots of workers getting our kitchen closer and closer to being ready to be a renewed tool for mission and hospitality. There are exciting things happening all around us; let’s craft them into stories of great opportunity to be servants of grace.

Shalom,

Pastor Eric