August 2024
The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. - Psalm 19:1-4a
In just a few days a group of eight of us from Peace UCC will head into the Canadian wilderness to delight in community and nature, and to open ourselves to the presence of God preaching though all of nature. This is a retreat that many of us have participated in over the years. There’s always lots of laughter, splashing, and playfulness – qualities that reflect some of the delight that we experience when we gather in various settings as a congregation – that sense of joy is a gift that our congregation has always embraced. For this week up north, the experience is interwoven with the quality of pilgrimage. The destination is hopefully a recentering in the sacred, deepening our relationship with God while allowing ourselves to be touched with the wonder of creation’s story. The psalmist so beautifully speaks of creation itself proclaiming God's amazing good news- it’s not with words, but it is with an invitation that transcends words. I know that canoes, tents, bugs, and beds on the ground aren’t experiences for everyone, but nature is around all of us, inviting us to come and know God. Indeed, studies that I’ve read throughout the years consistently name experiences in nature as one of the primary places that people encounter a sense of the divine. That’s part of the reason we’ve been offering this wilderness experience for all of these years. But you don’t have to travel that far: time in the garden, time walking in the woods, time watching the birds, each offers opportunities closer to home to experience God's creation proclaiming its story.
That said, an invaluable part of our wilderness experience is also the unplugging from the electronics and the noise of the day, so that we might recenter ourselves and remember who we are and whose we are. Every religion of the world encourages a continual practice of reframing our lives in the context of that which binds us to the transcendent. That’s ever harder to do in our noisy world.
I’m given the gift of routines of faith that remind me to refocus, sometimes in quiet, sometimes in near chaos. As I return from wilderness waters I will dive right into Vacation Bible School. That experience is another opportunity to be touched by God through the faces of little children and the incredible efforts of so many volunteers who invest each year in making the stories of our faith come to life anew. Our church Pignic will invite all of us into God's great sanctuary to change our venue and listen to nature join us in singing the glories of God.
Those moments of refocusing become so deeply important in these times when listening to God in the midst of incredibly chaotic times can be so challenging. As I write this newsletter we’ve just watched another assassination attempt executed on a politician, thankfully this time it was only the grazing of an ear. We’ve heard calls for unity as a nation, though much of the time these carry a quality that sounds disingenuous. The unity proclaimed invites everyone to come together and believe what one side or the other believes instead of celebrating the gift of our diversity and the power of working together with the gift of different perspectives. In the midst of the chaos that refocusing, recentering, remembering who and whose we are becomes ever more important.
I pray that we can pay attention to listening: to nature, to God, to our hearts. We are to remember the way of a young Jewish carpenter who sought desperately to open the eyes of the establishment to once again focus on the extravagance of God's love. I pray that we can remember how Jesus gathered at table with all manner of people, Pharisees and tax-collectors, women, and those accused of being unclean or unwelcome. We remember that Jesus was the one who crossed the borders of his time to heal and care for those in need, even when those nearest to him sought to emphasize the borders. We remember how Jesus was the one who fed people with faith in abundance, even when those who were closest to him saw only scarcity and the impossibility of caring for the thousands… and a few loaves and a few fish carried the story of faith. And we remember how Jesus railed against the kingdoms of this world - the antithesis to the current cries of Christian Nationalism – Jesus reminded people right to the cross that the power that he was offering was the power of love. We remember how those who gathered on Palm Sunday wanted Jesus to be the new king who would restore the government to Israel, to restore the Davidic kingship, and Jesus answered their pleas with his death and resurrection. Never forget that no part of Jesus' ministry sought to institute a government in his name! Rather, he challenged those who would follow him, all of us, to live out our citizenship through the way that we embody God's kingdom, the kingdom of heaven, in everything that we do. We are called to love like Jesus, to care for the least and the last and the lost; to love one another and not to love power. We are to remember that Jesus' message was that there was no place for violence to secure our position – no role for talk of revenge or belittling the other, no place for talking of the anointing of a ruler in this world. That’s not our story – or at least that’s not Jesus’ story, but it’s one that the powers of the world have often falsely tried to market. This is an incredibly challenging faith that we are to walk. It’s going to take a whole lot of recentering and listening to the divine in order for us to faithfully navigate our world. We won’t get to constantly escape to the Canadian wilderness to unplug, but we do get to escape to the sacred space of prayer and the rhythms of sabbath and worship wherever that happens for each of us.
I have included a series of prayers from the Wisconsin Council of Churches that might be good tools for the journey, they’re on the next page. Let these last weeks of summer be sacred reminders that God's story is always ringing out in songs of love and wonder, if only we refocus our lives to let go of the noise and listen… listen for the glory of God.
May God bless us!