From the Pastor's Study - September 2021

The September Tidings letter has always anticipated the fall program year and that regathering of the body of Christ in a somewhat more regular rhythm than what the summer offers. This year I find myself looking to the fall with the great hope that we will be able to regather in increasingly normal ways after a period of time much greater than just a summertime. As I write this article, I continue to be aware that all of our plans continue to be contingent on factors of which we are not fully in control – namely an ongoing pandemic. Every school is putting out their guidance and their plan for how to navigate this year in a way that will hopefully be more normal than the last year and a half. Churches are navigating the same journey, some guided strictly by fear, some guided by what they are calling faithfulness, but which sometimes looks more like bravado. At Peace UCC we are continuing to try to navigate this journey with the humility of only knowing what we know and trying to continue to lead in love and care for all of our members and our community. And I know that we are not managing to please everyone.

There is a common theme that I hear in conversations and that I feel in my own heart, and that is exhaustion and longing. Our healthcare systems speak of doctors and nurses experiencing PTSD-like symptoms as the health crisis that we had hoped was behind us is once again exerting a strain on the system. I imagine that for teachers and business owners there is that nagging concern that we don’t want to go backward… for the church we share that concern, and we share that longing to get back to normal.

Through the last year I have been regularly drawn to the story of the Exodus and of the Exile. Our story of faith holds deep wisdom for those who are frustrated and just want to get back to a more predictable existence. Interestingly, our story at no point simply suggests that God's people get to just go back to the way it was, nor does the story suggest that restoration happens quickly. God's people are always reminded that our journeys unfold in God's time – a euphemism for “get ready to practice patience.”

But the other thing that God keeps challenging the people to practice in the midst of adversity is a different way of living for themselves and in relation to others. This month the word ubuntu has been running through my mind. This philosophy that comes out of the Bantu-speaking cultures of Africa captured the imaginations of many people some years ago with definitions of the ubuntu as being something like “I am because we are.” At its core, this African philosophical system speaks of all of us being interconnected and finding our humanness in that interconnection. Letseka and Venter speak about how Ubuntu refers to the interconnected-ness between human beings which reminds one of the isiXhosa proverb Intaka yakha ngoboya benye, "A bird builds its nest with the feathers of other birds."[1] That sense of interconnection is at the heart of God's narrative for God's people. And in this moment in time, it feels like that interconnection is desperately lacking in our society and in our world. But that’s nothing new. In that period of exodus and exile it is a common theme for God's people to whine about what they want, what they need, instead of looking around and claiming the strength of possibility of being woven together into the fabric of God.

In Isaiah 58 the people “Cry with full throat, without restraint” with a lament that they hope will urge God to restore them to the ways things had been. Here are the people at the end of the Babylonian exile, longing for their return to Jerusalem and they just want God to make everything the way that it was. They practice the fasting that had been their way to get God's attention and they just want everything to change. And then they’re frustrated: “Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?” The people are practicing their faith expecting God to take notice, and what they get in return is God admonishing them for their selfish behavior. The people are crying out to God for relief and return to a past that they remember as glorious while failing to place the needs of others before their own. God calls them to something more like that ubuntu philosophy. In Isaiah 58:6 God declares “No, this is the kind of fasting I want: Free those who are wrongly imprisoned; lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. Share your food with the hungry, and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help. Then your salvation will come like the dawn, and your wounds will quickly heal. Your godliness will lead you forward, and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind. Then when you call, the Lord will answer. ‘Yes, I am here,’ he will quickly reply…”

We are living during an exhausting time, and perhaps most exhausting of all is the deep divisions that are being fueled at every turn. We have had an extraordinary opportunity to come out of a global crisis stronger and more unified as a people who have looked to care for their neighbor, to consider how they might place their neighbor’s health and strength and wellbeing as important as their own. I am because we are… We have had that opportunity, but like God's people in the past we desperately struggle to get out of our own way.

My prayer is that this fall we will get to celebrate a choir returning to worship, that we will manage to keep singing and gathering in greater numbers, that our Faith Formation classes (Sunday School, Confirmation, Adult Ed.) will be in person, that we will keep sharing fellowship and keep moving forward as a congregation with the strength and care that has been our hallmark. I believe that we can do this if we all work together, if we humbly embrace a little ubuntu philosophy, if we hear those words of Isaiah spoken to a people filled with longing to return from so long ago. God has shown us what it looks like to heal the divisions in our world and to hear God's cry “Yes, I am here.” It always starts with that simple command to love God and to love one another.

I have great hope for us, and I have faith that God is far from done with shaping us into a glorious tapestry of God's people, but I am also humbled that it looks like we all have a long and arduous journey of healing our hearts and souls ahead of us, rebuilding our relationship with one another and with God.

May God bless us on the journey,

Pastor Eric

[1] Letseka, MM & Venter, E 2012. "How Student Teachers understand African Philosophy", Koers - Bulletin for Christian Scholarship 77(1):1-8.

From the Pastor's Study - August 2021

In just a couple of weeks a very small group of us will be heading north for a shortened week of wilderness canoeing. We’ve begun describing the trip as the “almost Canada” canoe trip – we’ll be going into the Boundary Waters, a reminder of yet one more change caused by our world’s current challenge of trying to navigate the best path forward in a continuing pandemic. We have been grieving our inability to embark on the trip to Canada due to border restrictions. We are grieving as we encounter the changes in outfitter, and menu, and restrictions for travel. At some point along our journey, we may be almost close enough to see Canada… but we won’t get there this year. We are reminded that we are still journeying in that liminal space. 

I have found myself repeatedly being drawn to the story of the Exodus as we’ve navigated the challenges of the last couple of years. The narrative can touch our journey of faith in lots of different ways – the theme that I keep hearing is that of moving from a people who are enslaved to the life-sucking-ways of being brick builders for Pharaoh, into being shaped into a people who are freed in order that they might learn to follow and serve God. That call to a different life orientation is at the heart of our story of faith. That call also constantly becomes one of the greatest challenges for any us as we journey with God. Like the Israelites, we are quick to proclaim the vision and value of freedom, but we are slow to embrace a vision that is about freedom for a path in service to something greater than ourselves and not merely freedom from a circumstance that we don’t like. It’s very easy to grieve change and complain about all the things that we don’t like or don’t have. It’s much harder to turn to God and give thanks for what we do have and to keep our focus on the direction toward which God is leading us.  

On that Exodus journey the people keep looking back and they keep grumbling and they keep doubting that they will arrive in the promised land. Indeed, their lack of faith, and their inability to work together with one another and with God at one point leads God to that proclamation in Number 14:11 that reads: “The Lord said to Moses, “How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the signs I have performed among them?” God wants to wipe the slate clean and start over… but Moses convinces God not to give up on God's people. Perhaps you remember God's compromise, that the people would wander in the wilderness for forty years before arriving in that promised land. The people needed a generation to learn to work together and to trust in God... and even then it was often a struggle. 

We are living amid a world that I think God might judge in very similar fashion to that whining, selfish generation in the wilderness. There’s a desperate need for us to pull together, to work together, that we might choose to make meaning and strengthen our relationships with one another and with God during our wilderness journey. But that requires choosing a constructive attitude at every step along the way. 

We’re going to head into the wilderness with our little group, and I’m sure that there will be plenty of opportunities for us to whine about how our experience won’t be like what we’ve had in the past… or, we can choose to encourage one another to celebrate a long awaited chance to engage God's creation with one another. We can choose to let our time and our journey feed our souls and deepen our relationship with God. Every time that we do something as a group we are reminded of how much more fun, powerful, and rewarding it is when we work together.  

Around church lots of things are becoming re-energized. We are making plans for things like VBS, Sunday School, a Pignic, the Chancel Choir, Confirmation, Adult Faith Formation opportunities, and a Children’s Christmas program all to be unfolding in the next few months. Even as we return to soul-feeding opportunities that seem familiar, they will be different. Lots of activities may shift their times in the schedule. One of the things that many of you have noted is that a year ago when we were worshipping in the park on the first Sunday of each month that Communion shifted to the first Sunday instead of the last. By the end of the summer, we were talking about how much sense it made to align ourselves with most of the rest of our denomination and continue celebrating Communion on the first Sunday of the month. And so, we’ll continue with that new schedule for the future.  

My deep prayer is that as we continue this journey together, we all remember the power of working together. I also pray that we keep reminding ourselves and one another that our faith is about moving forward, and it is about humbling ourselves in loving God and loving our neighbor first and foremost. We are called to responsibility to all of God's people and creation. As a people of God, I pray that we can keep pulling together to bear witness to that freedom for which God has called us: the freedom to love like Jesus.  

From the Pastor's Study - June/July 2021

I love coming across news stories that open my mind to new ways of seeing something. This morning it was the quick image of a new commode for NASA. The caption underneath it identified the toilet seat and the storage container that would convert urine to potable water… then there was a comment from an astronaut: “Yep, today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee.” Eeew! At the same time, it is mind bending to think that technology is moving toward the stuff that I remember reading in science fiction novels in high school (the book Dune).

This week also brought stories about China landing a rover on Mars. This happened just shortly after we landed a rover on Mars and even flew a drone in the thin atmosphere of the planet. Researchers keep talking about encountering signs of frozen water that may at some point have supported life. How many of us grew up with stories imagining life on Mars and what it might mean? Then another story really piqued my curiosity, and this one was right here on earth. I was reading about researchers applying computer processing power and language learning software to listen to the communication of whales to try to decode their language. As researchers understand the whales’ language, the next step will be to try to communicate with them directly… it’s hard to imagine. But the comment that really caught my attention in the interview with the researchers was that they had all discussed the importance of listening to what the whales might have to say to them. They needed to agree that if they learned how to communicate with whales, then they would have to be willing to hear what these largest brained animals on earth might have to tell us, no matter how critical or unexpected. A willingness to hear the perspective from another species is a truly humbling notion. Imagine a 200-year-old bowhead whale being able to offer a perspective on how our world and our planet has changed and how they may perceive our role in those changes. What could we learn? Would we be willing to hear and try to grow as a result of the insights? Or would we simply double down on our own perspective and dismiss anything that was an unwelcome word, or a word that challenged our already defined perspectives?

The story of our faith often casts a vision of what might be, of how God's vision of the world might be very different from ours. I think of that simple line from the book of Revelation 21:1: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth” that echoes the last verses of the book of Isaiah. In each case, the vision is of a world that realigns itself with God's ways instead of the destructive and self-serving ways of the world. That poetry and those visions emerge out of times of weariness and oppression. At their heart, each of them pleaded with the faithful to be open to seeing with new eyes.

I have spoken often in the last year about the experience of living through this pandemic as placing us in a liminal time, a time that exists between the departure from the old normal but before our arrival into the next normal. In that space there is the challenge of naming what has not worked before, and of what we long for in the next space. There is an opportunity to listen for what new and surprising insights or wisdom might emerge. And there is a necessity in the attentiveness for patience to learn how that which is beyond ourselves will unfold and invite us into new possibilities.

For years there have been conversations in The Church about all that has been changing and how it seems that there is another reformation before us. Many in the church see a pattern of the church needing to re-imagine and re-form every 500 years. Whether we were ready for that or not, it seems that this global pandemic has awakened a host of questions of justice, equity, relevance, and vitality for the future of The Church and for our local congregation.

We regularly pray “thy kingdom come.” As we pray, we should be doing so with a longing that we could see our world as God sees it… to imagine that new heaven and new earth. But then again, would we really want to see the world that way if it meant that something would need to change in our lives, in our world, in how we embody the faith as a church?

My prayer is that together we might cultivate the curiosity to imagine beyond what we have always known. Maybe it is in the midst of summertime’s long days, or in some other liminal glimmer of different visions that we hear God's voice leading us forward into tomorrow. Our church and our nation are poised in anticipation of the possibility of reopening to a new or next normal.

As we draw close will we be willing to be bold in our imagining, hungry in our curiosity, and open to see beyond our known past toward tomorrow’s coffee or the insights of a whale?

We are called to look, listen, and discern together where God is calling us.

May God bless us abundantly on our common journey,

Pastor Eric

From the Pastor's Study - May 2021

“Are we there yet?” Those simple words have been running through my mind this morning — sometimes mocking, sometimes serious, crop up on any long road-trip. This morning they propelled me back to the long drives across country that were a part of every summer during my childhood. Growing up in Chicagoland with grandparents in the Boston and Denver areas meant that there were lots of journeys across long, seemingly endless states. At some point, I remember a cassette tape deck being added to the journey. For as long as its batteries held out, it sat at the ready on the front seat between my parents. What I remember was that one of the favorite responses to our antsyness was Frank Sinatra crooning “High Hopes” – “…everyone knows an ant can’t move a rubber tree plant! But he had high hopes… he had high hopes… he had high apple pie in the sky hopes…” A family singing in a hot car plying across the endless plains of Nebraska was somehow re-oriented to the possibility instead of just the present frustration. Somehow, I think that all of that travelling as a kid, and maybe the introduction of perspective re-orienting distractions, helped me to fall in love with the idea of the journey having value and not just the destination.

This year has been a journey, and it has exhausted most of us as we’ve waited for the destination of normalcy – “are we there yet?!?” These are good moments to remember that God journeys with us. Faith and grace are not destinations, but an orientation to a persistent, patient God who seems to love journeys. For God, those journeys are how God has always shaped God's people into a different way of seeing their lives and our world. And of course, it doesn’t take much pondering of the stories of scripture to remember that God's people have struggled and whined repeatedly and sometimes it has seemed like the cassette-deck-of-reorienting-inspiration has run out of battery power. But God keeps moving forward with us, hoping that we’ll come to cherish the blessings of the journey.

We are in the midst of the Easter Season – another time when God's people are invited to contemplate how the triumph of the good news has touched the world, past, present, and future. The season challenges us to be engaged with being kindlers of God's light in the world, and bearers of God's high hopes for all of creation. That’s incredibly good news, but it’s also hard work. We continue to live in a world that feels deeply divided. Politics, race, and even how we navigate a pandemic have each become painful reminders of how easy it is to let frustration and impatience overwhelm the perspective of the journey. I recently heard someone speak what used to be a more familiar phrase: “in my family growing up, we didn’t see race…” and I was struck with a new sadness. There was a time that we put on a band-aid and thought that the best thing would be if we just didn’t see difference. What we know is that this is only comfortable if you happen to be one of the people who has always felt seen. Our faith proclaims that each of us is created in the image of God. Our faith proclaims repeatedly that God's love and salvation is intended for all the earth. Yet sadly, instead of looking at a diverse landscape of humanity as an invitation to more fully understand the height and depth and breadth and diversity of God's love, we sell out to a more comfortable vision of homogenized unity.

We just heard the verdict in the George Floyd trial. Many have spoken of this as a pivotal moment for many in our world. Others have been rightly frustrated with that assessment as they note that had this been a white man, we would have expected nothing else. Even that deep division of perspective speaks to the continued challenge for us to work to understand and honor one another through trying to recognize the very different life experiences that people have. Jesus’ prayer for unity doesn’t come about by everyone holding hands and singing kumbaya as an affirmation that we’re all the same, but rather by joining hands and celebrating that we are united in being equally valued, equally seen, equally cherished icons through which to see the face of God.

The journey we are on is one that will be long and arduous. Two of the pandemics that we face, Covid-19 and racism, aren’t going to disappear quickly. We can whine and get frustrated and keep asking “aren’t we there yet?!” or we can open our hearts’ minds and see what we might learn along the way. How might both of these struggles invite us to see and love our neighbor more deeply? How can the diversity of people and ideas become a chance to celebrate how great and vast is the love of our God? One of the things that I’ve cherished about our congregation is one of the same things that I now feel as a division, and that is the diversity of politics and theology within our church family. We have a chance to do the work to grow. We have the chance to expand our vision of God through all of the differences among us and around us… or we have the chance to limit God to our own perspectives and our own self certainties. When we learn to embrace the journey — maybe even trying to love the change of rhythm — a long journey may even become a pilgrimage of the soul. There is much for us to see and to learn together.

Just a year ago I turned to these words from First Peter: "Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that you may be exalted in due time. Cast all your anxieties on God, because God cares for you. […] Steadfast in your faith, know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kind of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who calls you to eternal glory, will restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To God be the power forever and ever. Amen." (1 Peter 5:6-7 & 9-11) As we continue to lean into this Easter Season may we find the light of God beckoning us to have high hopes and to keep growing.

May God bless us,

Pastor Eric