“To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.”  – Ecclesiastes

Dearly Beloved,

With 2024 now behind us, we’re entering a milestone year—2025—a number which tells us we’re a quarter of the way through this century.  Will 2025 prove to be notable for other reasons?  As always, predictions vary widely, and it always seems easier to project negative trends than it is to predict positive ones.  As a new administration takes over the West Wing we can surely expect some turbulence, but how much and in what areas of our common life?  Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and quantum computing tools will roll out at an increasingly rapid pace, making life either significantly easier to cope with or exponentially more difficult to manage, depending on one’s point of view.  Climate challenges, human-on-human violence—these will all be in the mix.

Most certainly, life in 2025 will bring new highs and lows to our individual journeys and the human journey.  So we pray: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  In all of this, what role will faith play for us? The quotation below from James Kay has become a centering one for me in recent years:

“If the future were not the promise of Jesus Christ but the predictable outcome of present trends, despair would overwhelm us,” writes Kay.  But the message we cling to as people of faith is that “we can never take our own projections more seriously than God’s promises.”

All manner of things—good, bad, and in between—will unfold for us in 2025.  To weather it all, we must remind ourselves—and each other—that we are companioned by a Lord who will not leave or forsake us.  Yes, we put our trust in the crucified and risen One, who will accompany us come hell or highwater, all the way through the alley!

Last month I joined my five brothers at the home of eldest brother Peter and his wife Gabrielle in Southern California.  In recent months, cancerous melanoma has spread to Peter’s lungs and brain, and he’s receiving treatment.  We traveled there to share our love and support with Peter directly.  In the days just prior to the trip, the Santa Ana Winds blew fiercely, as they are wont to do this time of year, forcing hot desert air down into the L.A. basin.  These winds can reach speeds of up to 80mph and are particularly dangerous during fire season—which, during this dry year, has extended into winter.  On the plane ride down to L.A. I read about a fire in the mountains above Malibu that, egged on by the Santa Ana winds, threatened to blow up. Those mountains were visible from Peter’s home.  I wondered what I would encounter when the plane landed.

Low and behold, by the time the plane touched down the winds had ceased, the sky was blue, and the worst seemed to have passed.  As my brother Joel and I took the exit for Peter’s neighborhood, we could see the huge column of smoke and orange flames on the ridge not 10 miles away.  But, blessedly, the absence of wind meant the fire danger had lessened considerably.  And by the next morning a cool, moist marine layer had moved in, making the fire much more manageable for firefighters and less likely to derail our plans.

On our final afternoon together we gathered around the kitchen table in Peter and Gabrielle’s home for an improvised liturgy bookended by two psalms: Psalm 133 (“Behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity…”) and Psalm 121 (“I lift my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?  My help comes from the LORD, make of heaven and earth.”)  These pithy Psalms of Ascent—were sung by pilgrims as they made their way from their hometowns up to Jerusalem for various festivals.  I like to imagine Jesus learning them by heart as he traveled with his parents during his growing up years.  The time we brothers shared was precious, “like the oil running down upon the beard of Aaron…like the dew of Hermon falling on the maintains of Zion”; not only because of the many stories which were invoked and shared, but because we experienced a power greater than ourselves surrounding and holding us close: the LORD “who neither slumbers nor sleeps…who keeps our going out and coming in from this time on and forevermore.”  After the AMEN, we stood and sang in unison, as only brothers can, a stanza of the hymn we had sung 40 years earlier during Peter and Gabrielle’s wedding:

Joyful, joyful we adore thee, God of glory, Lord of love!

Hearts unfold like flowers before thee, praising thee, their sun above.

Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the gloom of doubt away.

Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day!

For everything there is a season.  And for us who hold Jesus, crucified and risen, as our Lodestar, each season, whatever its content, is laden with hope.  Not a hope based on optimism in human abilities or achievements but a hope invested in him whom death itself could not hold captive.  As this new year begins it is with Jesus Christ that we plant our stake in the ground.

With you on the Way,

Pastor Erik

Lift up your eyes and ask yourself who made these stars….calling each by name?  Because God is so great in strength, so mighty in power, not a single one is missing.  How can you say… “my destiny is hidden from YHWH, my rights are ignored by my God?”  Do you not know? Have you not heard?  YHWH is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  This God does not faint or grown weary; with a depth of understanding that is unsearchable.

Isaiah 40:26-28

Dear Waiters and Watchers,

I always look for them, casting my eyes upward as I wheel the garbage to the street on winter nights; searching the sky for a break in the clouds and a window to the heavens.  And in those moments when I do catch a glimpse of the stars, something in me expands and I feel transported from this lowly life to a place that is greater.  Do you know what I mean?

The dimensions of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are mind-boggling—up to 400 billion stars—and perhaps at least as many planets—arranged in a giant spiral disk of stars, dust, and gas measuring 100,000 light-years in diameter.  Astronomers tell us that our own solar system, arrayed around a single one of those stars, is located in the “outer suburbs” of our galaxy, 27,000 light years from the galaxy center.  To put it in more accessible terms, if our solar system was the size of a quarter, our galaxy would be 1,200 miles in diameter.  And here’s the clincher: the Milky Way is but one of perhaps 500 billion galaxies!

So many sources of light and so much energy and mass given to producing it.  And yet, within this vast universe, it’s the nonluminous material—the DARK MATTER and DARK ENERGY—that constitute together 95% of the total mass of the universe.  To say it another way, 95% of the universe is cloaked in mystery.  Does dark reveal anything to us about God?

It’s December and the season of Advent is upon us.  Coming to us in the northern hemisphere as daylight wanes and nights grow long, ADVENT is often awash with metaphors of LIGHT and DARKNESS.  So often in these scenarios LIGHT is associated with all that is good and right and true, while DARKNESS is associated with all that is bad and false and wrong.  Yet from the beginning, as the first chapter of Genesis illustrates, darkness and light have com­plementary roles to play within God’s magnificently unfolding universe.  When God creates the light, the darkness is not extinguished or cursed, but is integrated into the rhythm of the daily round.  Light and darkness each have purpose in the created order.

Imagine, if you can, a world that lacked Daytime or lacked Nighttime.  Imagine Scripture’s saving story told without NIGHT, without DREAMING.

• No starlit sky to which Abram gazes while God affirms the promise.
• No midnight vision for Jacob while fleeing his brother, no Jacob’s ladder.
• No divine – human wrestling match at the ford of the Jabbok.
• No prison-borne dreaming that leads Joseph to ascendancy under Pharoah.
• No pillar of fire by night guiding and protecting Moses and the Hebrew children as they move out of slavery, through the Red Sea, and onto their wilderness journey to the Promised Land.
• And two millennia later, no Messenger in the dark whispering to another Joseph: FEAR NOT TO TAKE MARY AS YOUR WIFE, FOR THE CHILD SHE CARRIES IN HER DARK WOMB IS HOLY.

Every life form on this planet home has evolved under the influence of night and day, darkness and light, and life as we know it could not exist without their DANCE.  Our Advent invitation this year is to stay alert to ways of imagining darkness and shadow NOT as attributes to be shunned, but rather as attributes to be hallowed.

In the shadow of your wings I will praise your name, O God!

During Wednesday evening gatherings this season we will explore this theme.  And on both Sundays and Wednes­days Scripture readings, hymns, and songs will build upon the theme that God’s presence is made manifest in light and dark and shadow.  Consider joining us.

“Hope begins in the dark,” writes Elizabeth Hunter.  “In deep, dark, winter soil little seeds nested underground are kept safe and nurtured.  When skies are dark, stars can be seen more clearly. In darkness, the natural sleep cycles of nocturnal animals and migratory patterns of birds are undisturbed.  Darkness has many benefits.”[1]

In the short story NIGHTFALL, Isaac Asimov tells the tale of the fictional planet Lagash, whose six suns keep it perpetually in light.  Residents of this fictional world experi­ence a star-filled nighttime sky only when astronomical factors perfectly align once every 2050 years.  For a brief period during this rare interlude all six suns fall away from view, exposing the inhabitants to the dark, starry sky.  The affect, however, is not awe and wonder but rather pandemonium.   Nyctophobia—irrational fear and foreboding  of the night—grip the populace of Lagash, unleashing internal forces so intense that the result is the complete destruction of the planet’s civilization. Survivors are left to build their lives—and their civilization—over from scratch.  Asimov’s tale is a fascinating take on the notion of perpetual light as a fiendishly potent enemy.  Might it also serve as a warning to a society which has elevated “whiteness” onto the pedestal superiority and consigned “blackness” to the dungeon of inferiority?

From the beginning darkness and light, day and night have been necessary components of the unfolding story God is telling.  Parts of a single whole, both are declared GOOD.  And both are seedbeds for our social and spiritual lives.  Absent one, the other suffers immeasurably.  Fourth century Cappadocian monk Gregory of Nyssa flipped the West’s social/spiritual paradigm on its head when he wrote: “Moses’s vision began with light.  Afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud.  But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.”[2] What rich, new insights become available to us when we’re willing to explore the precincts of the night!

I leave you with one verse of a hymn by Brian Wren that we’ll be singing this month:

Joyful is the dark, holy, hidden God, rolling cloud of night beyond all naming:

majesty in darkness, energy of love, Word-in-flesh, the mystery proclaiming!

Blessed Advent(ure)!

Pastor Erik

[1] Elizabeth Hunter quoting Anne Lamott, Hope Begins in the Dark, in her article in Gather Magazine, November/December 2021 Issue, page 1.

[2] Quoted by Barbara Brown Taylor in Learning to Walk in the Dark, p. 48