“Thus says the LORD: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you perceive it?”

– Isaiah 43:18-19

Beloved of God,

We know them—people dominated by narratives from their past; narratives that hold them captive; narratives from which they are unable to extract themselves.  There may be good reasons for this.  And yet, staying stuck in old patterns exacts a price on the present, and can prevent us from seeing the promise and the possibility of an alternative future.  We know them, and at times we are them.

While I was in Minnesota recently, visiting my mother Shirley in her final days, I was simultaneously going through personal items at my parents’ home as we prepared to put the house on the market.  The first night there, I found a neat pile of items from the past that had been collected and set aside.  A few of them delighted me—the “lost” penny collection from my childhood—including two WW2 vintage aluminum pennies—which I was convinced my younger brothers had raided to buy candy at the corner store.  And the wonderful handwritten notes (in fine cursive script!) I’d received from Montana classmates after moving to Minnesota in the midst of my 4th grade year.  Those I brought home.

There were other items that didn’t make the return trip to Seattle.  Most of these consisted of letters I had written to my parents through the years, some of them during times of significant trial.  As I began reviewing them I could feel the weight of those trying times begin to bear down on me once more.  After a quick phone call to a confidant, they found their way into the recycle bin.  The relief was palpable.  I would not allow bygone events to wriggle their way into my present or my future.

The prophet Isaiah says as much to God’s people as they prepare to leave the land of their exile and head home:

“That old material that once dominated your lives?—leave it behind. I’ve got something better in store for you—in fact it’s unfolding right now, and if you pay attention you can see it!” 

This is God’s message to us all in the death and resurrection of Christ: those old narratives and conflicts, the old prisons, the personal and collective hells that have kept us captive have been breached once and for all.  God is doing a new thing, and it is marvelous in our eyes!  The future is OPEN!

Holy Week and Easter Blessings!

Pastor Erik

“Judging others makes us blind, but love gives us sight.

By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and

to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship

Beloved of God,

Their names run the gamut from the 16th century English poet John Donne to the two 18th century slaves-turned-abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; from the 5th century’s Saint Patrick to the 20th century’s Saint Oscar Romero.  What do they have in common?  In each case, their commemoration date or feast day on the church calendar falls on a Sunday during Lent this year.  Add to these the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and resister during Hitler’s 3rd Reich, and we end up with a season peopled by followers of Christ who demonstrated uncommon courage through acts of love and discipleship in the face of fear and institutional injustice.  Look for their names, their faces, and their deeds to be woven through our worship life as the season of Lent unfolds.

Each of these extraordinary persons lived out their vocations in full understanding of their need for community; and each has something to teach us about the value of community in our 21st century world—a world which, though more socially “connected” than ever, is marked by estranged relationships and the inability to talk across “enemy” lines.  The life stories of these diverse witnesses inspire us to see our own with fresh eyes.

It was the poet and pastor Donne who penned the lines:

               “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…

any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” [1]

This is the reality we seek to live each week when we gather as God’s beloved community around the Eucharistic meal.

Our family has felt the embrace of this beloved community in a profound way over the last month in the aftermath of Kai’s sledding accident.[2]  Church community, school community, neighborhood community, medical community—all of them, all of you—rallied to weave a dense layer of prayer and care around our family in the face of trauma.  We lift our hearts in gratitude to God for you—tangible emblems of God’s ever present, compassionate accompaniment.

There are many examples of ongoing trauma besetting our world.  By refusing to allow fear to control or silence them, these ordinary people named above became extraordinary witnesses, telling the truth, breaking down barriers, challenging the status quo, putting their own lives at risk while leading others to freedom.

Minutes before being assassinated while presiding at Holy Communion in San Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Romero told his congregation: “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that…only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain.  The harvest comes becomes of the grain that dies… We know that every effort to improve society above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.” 

If Bonhoeffer is right—that judging blinds us but love gives us sight—then perhaps this Lenten season can become an opportunity for practicing less judging and more loving.  The traditional disciplines of Lent—prayer, fasting, almsgiving—sets us up beautifully to do just that, and to follow our Lord on a pilgrim’s journey that will lead us from death to life.

With you on the Way,

Pastor Erik

[1] From MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

[2] By God’s mercy, Kai’s healing is progressing well.

“Oh, the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows

and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone.”

– Mary Oliver

 “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”

– Robert Frost

Beloved of God,

One of the great motivations for us to move forward with our plans to “refresh” our sanctuary and narthex with new carpet, paint, lighting, furniture, and windows, is to make our building space and facilities match the bright, vibrant and welcoming nature of our community.  Phases 1 and 2 of this project call for us to focus on spaces within the building, but conversations will inevitably lead us to evaluate the outside of our building as well—the face we project to the neighborhood and community beyond our doors.

We’ve done quite a bit in recent years—via God’s Work-Our Hands projects, patio events, raingardens and cisterns, Tiny House build, ramps, little library, solar panels, HUB work—to give neighbors a view into the priorities of this congregation that gathers at 39th and Thistle.   When we replace the westside narthex windows (Phase 2) with ones which are more energy efficient and which allow us to visually connect with the world outside our building (and visa versa), we’ll be taking another step toward seeing our mission more clearly.  That mission to “venture beyond ourselves” (Vision Statement) calls us to always be looking for ways to connect with the people and world around us; ways to join in the work God is already doing there.

While we’ve been moving forward with our facility plan, the news cycle in the greater world has been dominated by conversation about the need—or not—for a wall along the U.S. Mexico border.  Poet Mary Oliver, who died last month, reminds us that walls not only separate people and things, they damage the souls of those who erect them. (See excerpt of her poem above.)  The next line of her poem reads: “In those years I did everything I could do and I did it in the dark— I mean without understanding.” Entrenched positions put blinders on us from which there is no escape.

During this Season of Light we are called to follow Christ beyond our personal or corporate entrenchments. To remind us how difficult this can be, as February begins we hear the story of Jesus’ sermon in this hometown of Nazareth. At first, the community seems to welcome his message – proclaiming liberty to captives and letting the oppressed go free sounds perfectly fine to them.  But the ensuing conversation devolves into an argument about insiders and outsiders and the next thing you know, the hometown crowd is ready to throw Jesus over the cliff!

St. Paul, who planted many congregations throughout the Mediterranean world and who struggled to help them grasp the implications of being grafted into Christ, spoke powerfully about the importance of reconciliation, which at its heart is about breaking down barriers so relationships can be restored. In Ephesians he writes: “For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups (Jew and Gentile) into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”  And in 2 Corinthians Paul testifies to the God “who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”

In his poem, Mending Wall, Robert Frost takes us with him as he and his neighbor go through their annual process of “setting the wall between us” which weather, man, and beast have breached. In the middle of this exercise, Frost wonders aloud why they do it.  “Good fences make good neighbors,” comes his neighbor’s reply.  And Frost challenges: “Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.  Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”  In the end, Frost concludes of his neighbor, “He moves in darkness as it seems to me, not of woods only and the shade of trees.”

A good deal of the opposition Jesus experienced in his ministry—including in his hometown—had to do with how he pushed the presumed boundaries of God’s circle of care outward, so that it encompassed those whom law and tradition had walled out.  When at his crucifixion the curtains of the Temple are torn in two from top to bottom—the last wall between God and humanity is breached.  But we human beings are good at building and maintaining walls and fences.  And so the work of erecting them in locations both new and old continues ad nauseam.

Yet, however much we find ourselves tilting toward the task of erecting or reinforcing barriers that would divide, Jesus shows us—and great poets remind us—not to mindlessly accept the convention of wall building, but to bend will and body instead to the task of their dismantling.

Peace,

Pastor Erik