{"id":1005,"date":"2010-10-28T15:10:32","date_gmt":"2010-10-28T22:10:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/?p=1005"},"modified":"2010-12-01T18:14:36","modified_gmt":"2010-12-02T01:14:36","slug":"pastors-pen-for-november-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/?p=1005","title":{"rendered":"Pastor’s Pen for November 2010"},"content":{"rendered":"
You do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, <\/em><\/address>\n
until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.\u00a0 \u2013 2 Peter 1:19<\/address>\n

Beloved of God,<\/p>\n

Daylight is growing more precious these days, as the time of the sun\u2019s setting slips before 6pm and the sun\u2019s angle continues its slow descent.\u00a0 No more cycling after supper; no more evening walks at sunset. \u00a0One month ago the sun\u2019s arc here rose to 39\u02daabove the horizon; now its position is 29\u02da, halfway to the low point of 19\u02da it will achieve on the winter solstice.\u00a0 On November 7th, All Saints Sunday<\/em> (and the end of daylight savings time), we\u2019ll lose an hour\u2019s light in one fell swoop.\u00a0 It always feels like a descent to me, this movement into darkness, accentuated this year by the forecast of an El Ni\u00f1a<\/em> winter, with plenty of lowland rain and mountain snow.\u00a0 It was in large part for this reason that our gas fireplace was recently repaired.\u00a0 When, in the wake of storms, the outages come, we\u2019ll have a place of warmth to huddle around.<\/p>\n

As a young man in Minnesota, I loved venturing out during the wildest storms Mother Nature could conjure.\u00a0 Bundled in robust clothing, I trekked into the gaping maw of the beast, awed and exhilarated as the storm propelled me into the experience its dark fury.\u00a0 After such a foray, returning to the light and warmth of home and hearth was a revelation.\u00a0 Ah!\u00a0 What grace!\u00a0 What wonder!\u00a0 What gratitude!<\/em>\u00a0 Little did I know that the vocation for which God was preparing me would lead me to traverse some of the most sublime and tortured territory of the human soul.<\/p>\n

In his potent little book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Life of Vocation<\/em><\/span>, Parker Palmer writes:<\/p>\n

Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands\u2026a transformative journey\u2014full of hardships, darkness, and peril\u2014to a sacred center \u2026 But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story, but it is the part of the story most often left untold\u2026Many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. [p.18]<\/address>\n

Palmer has the Scriptures on his side<\/strong>.\u00a0 One of the blessings of our faith tradition is the wisdom our spiritual ancestors expressed in not removing or sanitizing experiences of the dark side from the stories they preserved and passed on to us, but including them, so they can stand as markers for us as we, too, embark on this \u201cjourney toward joining the human race.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In the dwindling light of November we mark two feast days: All Saints Sunday<\/span>, in which we recall the legacy of folks\u2014some of whom we know\u2014who kept the faith often through dark and turbulent times and often despite their own failures and misgivings; and Christ the King Sunday<\/span>.\u00a0 Ironically, the gospel text which founds our faith in Christ\u2019s reign is the scene of Jesus\u2019 crucifixion.\u00a0 Suspended helplessly between heaven and earth, suffering, bleeding, suffocating; surrounded by mockers who can\u2019t get enough of this comeuppance, Jesus is the antithesis of a king. Yet, even as hope vanishes and darkness descends, Jesus speaks \u201cpromise\u201d to the shadowy criminal whose life, like his own, is about to meet an ignoble end.\u00a0 \u201cToday,\u201d<\/em> Jesus promises, \u201cyou will be with me in Paradise.\u201d<\/em> [Luke 22:43]<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t know much about the life of Jesus prior to his baptism and the beginning of his public ministry, but I can well imagine a young man who, like young people before him and since, had to come to terms with the \u201cshadowy parts\u201d of his life before he could come to that \u201ccenter, full of light,\u201d<\/em> which was his true vocation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The One we worship as King did not count equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself, even to the point of death on a cross.\u00a0 He has experienced human darkness in its fiercest forms.\u00a0 Whatever shadows and dark places we have or will endure, we can be confident he has been there before us and will go there with us once again\u2014to hell and back.\u00a0 We do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in our hearts.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Blessings on the way,<\/p>\n

Pastor Erik<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.\u00a0 \u2013 2 Peter 1:19 Beloved of God, Daylight is growing more precious these days, as the time of the sun\u2019s setting slips before 6pm and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletter","category-pastors-pen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1005"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1037,"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peacelutheranseattle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}