From the Pastor's Study - June & July 2024

“Never place a period where God has placed a comma,”

            - God is Still Speaking -

It has been almost two decades since the UCC took a quote from Gracie Allen and paired it with a proclamation that has been at the heart of our denomination’s faith and history. I have always been excited to be a part of a church that takes seriously Jesus’ promise from the Gospel of John (16:12-13) when he tells those who are dearest to him, “I have much more to say to you, but you can’t handle it now. However, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you in all truth.” The invitation is for us to be a people of faith who take seriously how it is that the Spirit of God is leading us forward. When we pair this idea up with Jesus’ command to “love one another as he has loved us,” we encounter this incredible journey of not just looking over our shoulders at what God has done, but an exciting opportunity to walk with God in an unfolding ministry of extravagant love.

I have always loved the way that this command to walk with God in love has managed to transcend the boundaries that our world is so good at creating. For twenty-six years, I’ve been humbled to tell my colleagues about the magic that I’ve seen at Peace UCC, where it has always felt like we have been able to listen for God and love one another across our social, political, and cultural differences. At our best we have nurtured a spirit that is eager to discern together how God's love is being revealed among us. This has always required a spirit of trust and humility that allows us to both share from the depths of our beings while also holding a willingness to listen to what others are sharing from the depths of theirs. It’s hard work, and it’s far from perfect. Our certainties tend to get in the way of our listening. Our passions can get in the way of our sharing with humility. Still, those moments happen when we get it right and together it feels like we are discerning what Jesus would do, rooted in what Jesus did do, and that was always about love, care, and respect. When those moments happen, there is a clear embodiment of “where two or three are gathered in my name, I’m there with them.” This witness shone forth in 2019 when our congregation voted to declare itself Open and Affirming, and it shines forth every time I hear someone speak about a spirit of love that binds the disparate group of travelers together on the way with Jesus.

As a congregation, that way of working together with one another in discernment has been the heartbeat of God's love at work in the church. It’s the reminder that God is not speaking through any one of us individually. It’s not about power grabs or positioning and it’s not about the gifts of any one pastor or leader. It’s about joining together in being this crazy and extraordinary body of Christ that always feels like it might be the antidote to the fractured ways of our lives and our world.

As we enter this summer season, I pray that we would listen together for where God is still speaking to us. I encourage us to spend more time with the unfinished “commas” of our story which keep drawing us ever more deeply into the service of God's extravagant love. As we engage in mission trips and wilderness canoe adventures, as we create imaginative space for youngsters to experience their faith in Vacation Bible School, or create spaces to be gathered at table for our church Pignic or with our summer meal program, we are encouraged not just to be busy, but to be animated in the life and witness of our Still-Speaking God. May God bless us in this journey of discerning how God is working through each of us woven into this story together.

From the Pastor's Study - May 2024

Today is another spectacular day that proclaims that spring is in our midst. But of course, that may change at any moment. This year has been a particularly curious dance between teases of spring, summer, and winter all jumbled into one another, sometimes even within a single week. You all know how I love watching the natural world and the ways that creation is constantly beckoning for us to pause and pay attention. Yesterday, my daughter Berit sent a picture of a middle-aged member of her Holden community down on his hands and knees smelling the daffodils. You can still see lots of melting snow piles in the photo from that mountain village, and there is James taking the time to go all-in with smelling the flowers!

Within the church year we have entered the Easter season. For a week of weeks we celebrate the good news of Jesus' resurrection. We hear story after story of how love seeks to overcome grief and fear, doubts, and despair. We are invited to see God working through the hard things in life with an eye to rewriting the struggle with glimmers of extravagant love. A grown man on his knees smelling the daffodils feels like an apt reminder that God's story of hope and love is woven into the very fabric of creation. Our journey is learning to see and to align ourselves with that wonder both in how we live in the world, and how we look at our own lives. Yet we all know that this may be one of the hardest things we will ever learn to do. The external world is full of so many distractions and challenges; and our internal world isn’t much different. We can struggle with our willingness to believe that God loves us and thinks that we’re amazing just as we are, to think that a resurrection life if for us and our dark places and the even the struggles of the world.

The flowers bloom, and we sing hallelujah, and we see people bending down to appreciate life, and maybe we can hear God inviting us into the next season for our lives and our world where God imagines always greater things ahead of us. It’s interesting that the church season knows that this is hard to imagine, hard to believe – like a resurrection would be hard to imagine – and so we are given 50 days of stories to remind us. Of course, when that season is done, we’ll get another season of stories to remind us of another aspect of God's wonder and love inviting us to get on our knees and breath deep of God's spirit.

Alleluia, and Amen!

The Season of Pentecost will begin May 19th and then the next week we will shift to our summer schedule from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend with one service at 9:00 a.m. Last year the congregation loved having the chance to reconnect with people that they might not usually see because of going to different services. People appreciated the change of rhythm.

In the next months there are lots of opportunities to lean into God's proclamation of new life – some are described in the following pages, some will be discussed in upcoming bulletins and tidings: Family Promise, our Community Meal, a summer meal program, Habitat for Humanity, a wilderness canoe trip, VBS… each may be an opportunities to discern how God may be inviting us to share in living God's love in ever deeper ways.

From Vikar Jakob's Study - April 2024

After over a year in the States, I will now finally return to Germany – however, my stay will be merely transitory, a vacation. Talk about the ever–diverging paths of life! Recently, as a part of a clergy retreat out at Cedar Valley, we talked about how our lives as Christians are “woven together” (Colossians 2:2), other translations have us being “drawn” together, “knit” together, or simply “united” – “in love”. It sure is amazing to look back and see the all the meandering threads of our lives being united to others, as they connect for a while, separate at some points, maybe to be rejoined in some distant future. 

My own thread of life had been – at least physically – disconnected from most people I knew a year ago, and yet so deeply held and caught and carried by all the mingled threads of this community that pulled me into their tapestry, invited me into their patterns and frameworks and stories that I never had a chance to even miss my home – instead finding one away from what was home once.

I see these threads pulsating with life and light before my eyes, as they all join together into this crazy venture called Peace Church. We are a family, and I have been invited to join it as both a son and a father, as both a brother and a friend. The word “Welcome” constitutes the center of our mission and our theology, the Good News we proclaim boldly, that we hold ourselves accountable to.

At the same time, as any one of us, my thread comes from different, far–away places that made me into who I am. To revisit those places now will be so special, and, at times, surreal. To visit my home village, reconnect with my old parish and the wonderful people there, dive back into the big city life of Berlin even for just a few days, meet my parents and friends all over, friends that shaped my journey so deeply over the different stations of my life – all of this means following my own thread all the way back to where it began.

What is the sum of a life? We don’t get to define and quantify the answer to that question. It’s enough to know that the great weaver of life gently holds our thread through all the stains and valleys, and through the golden gloss and luster as well. In the shadow of St. Patrick’s, we may say with the Irish: “It’s in the shelter of each other that the people live” – woven together in love.

May His Peace be with you all. 

Pastor Jakob

From the Pastor's Study - March 2024

Do you ever hear an inspiring sentence or two from a story and have it catch your imagination? Maybe one inspiring fragment teases your curiosity, and you wonder what the rest of the story might be. This is the way that our story of faith so often greets us. As we delve again into Mark’s Gospel, we encounter this over and over. Mark’s Gospel is so sparse with details. It tweaks the imagination if we let it.

We’ve just begun the season of Lent and the text from the first Sunday always speaks of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness for forty days. Matthew and Luke describe that temptation with depth and soaring details. But with Mark, all we get are fragments of a story: “The Spirit then compelled Jesus to go into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan for forty days. He was out among the wild animals, and angels took care of him.” Our forty-day journey in Lent mirrors this time of preparation for Jesus before he would begin his ministry. It is a length of time that occurs often in scripture: forty days for Noah’s ark to weather the flood, forty days for Moses as he received the ten commandments, forty days for Elijah fasting and praying, forty years even for Moses and the Israelites as they journey in the wilderness toward the promised land. That number forty reminds us of all these stories of God seeking to align God's people with God's ways. And so, the early church established a period of forty days of fasting and praying prior to the good news of Easter (they exclude the feast days of Sundays). The time encourages us to consider how we would turn from the ways of the world and turn back to the ways of God.

I don’t know about you, but I know that habits are hard to break and that it might just take forty days or more of trying to realign my behavior. Jesus spends those forty days there in the wilderness with the wild animals and angels serving him. Mark’s text makes it sound like it could be an extraordinary time of sabbath that would realign Jesus with the very purposes of creation. Jesus was to be in harmony with the natural world to spend time with the wild animals, and to come to see and understand how all of creation is beloved by God and created to be in harmony. That’s not to say that all in the desert is peaceful, for some animals relate to others as prey and nights may be cold and long. But I hear in those simple words the possibility of Jesus returning to a vision of creation that is offered in the stories of Genesis, of a garden of Eden where everything existed in relative harmony. What an amazing fullness of time for Jesus to remember who he is in relation to all creation. He’s just heard that he’s God's beloved in the verses before this, and now he learns what that means in relation to creation itself. What would it mean to ground ourselves in remembering who we were created to be so that we could say a holy yes to the ministry and the path before us?

We live in a world where it seems that we are encouraged to forget who we are. We are pulled in all kinds of ways by temptations. We are swayed by people assuring us that if we just believe as they do and do what they do that we will be “right.” Mark offers those few words that can draw us back to the vision God had at the beginning of creation, so that when Jesus proclaims God's kingdom, it’s not just a kingdom that is for us as humans but rather one that includes a different way of being for all that is.

As we continue our Lenten journey, may we keep being shaped by remembering who we are, and whose we are. May we learn to live that vision of God's creation as we step out into our ministry in the world. May we nurture a renewed vision of who we are so that we are prepared to proclaim God's good news of Easter for all of creation!