August 2022

From the Pastor’s Study

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a month since I returned from sabbatical. I cannot begin to thank all of you enough for the opportunity to recharge and to recenter myself. During our time drinking in the wonders of creation, celebrating the gift of my family, and reconnecting with lots of friends and family from whom we’ve been disconnected too long, I kept thinking about the admonition in the book of Exodus (31:15) that speaks of death being the penalty for not keeping the sabbath. The command is to let the practice of sabbath reinforce a perpetual covenant between God and God's people. Clearly, we don’t read this text as a literal command to stone people for working in the yard on Sunday, or for not tending to their faith practices. Instead, I see ever more boldly the ways that our not setting time aside for our relationship with God can wear us down until the spark of divine life within us threatens to flicker out. In secular settings we hear discussions about work/life balance, the idea is much the same. We need to tend to that which gives us life and sustains us, or something within us dies and we burn out.

I’ve told many people that I felt guilty for having the opportunity to go and kindle that light for an extended sabbath. It has been clear to me that everyone could benefit from such a block of time for recentering their lives and souls. Since returning, I’ve also heard from a number of people how grateful they are that I went, that they could see how worn out I had become. That’s never a welcome word. But I’ve heard those comments as kind reminders that the task of sabbath is supposed to be a regular rhythm.

I’m grateful to have returned at the beginning of summer when everything around us beckons for us to slow down and let the season help us to refocus. Longer days and a world full of things that grow and bloom, children whose laughter we can hear through open windows, people coming and going with stories of vacations, all speak to a way of being in the world that can shift our perspective and reconnect us to who we are and whose we are. Those seasonal shifts are wonderful, but there is also a need for the regular rhythm of tending to our souls. I’ve often told couples preparing to be married that there is no magic to being present in church every Sunday except that it offers that weekly rhythm that happens with scheduled regularity that places that pause for God into our lives. When that time for our relationship with God isn’t on the schedule, it too easily gets short changed.

It's good to be back, it’s good to see more people returning to worship and to be increasingly made aware of those who are regularly with us online. It’s a gift to feel the love and support that this congregation offers to me, and my family – I always hope it is reflected to all who are a part of this church family.

As we continue a journey of emerging from the last couple of years, we’re going to need to keep taking care of ourselves and one another. I know that our church life will very likely look different than it did before March of 2020, and that’s okay. We need to move forward and not back as we discern how we can be God's light in the world in this time and place.

There is a Psalm which keeps running through my head, Psalm 133. It is a song of ascents. I can imagine it offered while going up to a place where we might have new perspective and we might hear these words: 1 How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity! 2 It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the collar of his robe. 3 It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion. For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore. Hold that image of the unity that we so desperately need in a weary and divided world. Feel that oil of anointing and consecrating running over our heads in such abundance that it drips from our face and runs down our clothes blessing us and claiming us as God's beloved. Consider how the water and snowfall that falls on mount Hermon flows to the Jordan and out to water the earth and give life. Imagine that life-giving image as flowing from the sacred mountain of God with that abundant proclamation of life forevermore.

My prayer is that we might nurture that new perspective, work toward that unity and find all of our lives ever more richly blessed.

From the Pastor's Study - February 2022

This morning was aswirl with conversations about the ongoing legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. To listen to the various discussions about where we began as a nation and how far we still have to go, were both inspiring and deeply challenging. We are people of great hope who, at our best, learn from the past and use it as strength to imagine the still unrealized future. This morning I heard a reference to African American Spirituals and the way that they straightened out question marks and turned them into exclamation points… it was a compelling image. The description was brought home with the familiar Spiritual which had taken Jeremiah 8:22’s question and flipped it on its head. In the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, the people’s long exile and hoped-for return, Jeremiah asked the question: Is there no balm in Gilead? Can no physician be found? Why has healing not yet come to my poor people? But we all know how the spiritual rings out with all of its familiarity: There is a balm in Gilead! To make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.

Two years ago, we couldn’t have predicted how a pandemic would have impacted our society, our economy, our churches. For the church in America, we were already in a place of trying to discern how God's spirit was leading us into unknown territories. Clearly, the church has been steadily changing for many decades. The question that would have been reasonable decades ago of “what church do you attend?” now would more naturally be the question of whether or not a person attends a church at all. Many of us in the old Mainline denominations have wondered where we are heading in our witnessing to the love and grace of God for ALL the world. This has felt like an even harder question to ask as the dominant voices within Christianity have become those of fear, guilt, or a love-of-God which can sound small and transactional rather than extravagant and grace-filled beyond our imaginings. Our world has become a series of question marks: What is the future? When will this pandemic end? What will the outcome be for our economy? or even something as simple as someone asking what is our current membership? To each of those questions there are no clear answers – and that is a strange place to journey for two years with some saying we may have a couple more ahead of us. What seems clear is that we are running a marathon rather than a sprint. And what seems equally clear is that we would do well to learn from those who lived in the midst of darkness and oppression that exceeds our imaginations, to learn from a slave’s song that turns question marks in exclamation points that there is a balm, there IS a promise before us. We are invited to sing it out and to live it with all that we’ve got as a proclamation that God's strength is greater… greater than anything we may be able to imagine.

Life is always a journey of choice and perspective! That said, there are many times when we can too easily get locked into our familiar ways and fail to imagine how we might straighten a crooked line.

In a few weeks, we will once again embark on another journey together as we begin a Sabbatical time from February 7th through June 5th. We will be traveling separately, but the opportunity for each of us is to listen for how God is calling us into a future yet unknown. You will have the blessing of lots of different voices leading worship, hopefully connecting you more deeply to the Wider UCC, as well as offering a different perspective than what I might offer. I will be taking the opportunity to spend lots of time reading and in prayer as Laura and I travel with our trailer along a path yet unknown. We are hoping to explore a sampling of our country’s National Parks, Forests, and natural spaces. We are looking forward to reconnecting with old friends and one another, to witness to Berit’s graduation, and all along the way for me to reconnect again with God’s call for my ministry. The great hope is that as we reconnect in June, we all are refreshed and reinvigorated to reunite our journeys.

For the church’s part, this is a great opportunity to reaffirm how strong and capable Peace UCC is and has always been. I have always celebrated that this church is quite clearly God's church, not mine, not even yours. We are all passing through, giving thanks that this was a strong church before any one of us arrived, and our prayer is that it will be a strong church when any one of us is gone. This time of Sabbatical is a great time for people in the church to step up to the challenge of reaffirming that strength together.

Of course, we undertake this journey in the midst of one of the most challenging times that the church has experienced in most of our lifetimes. The pandemic has strained our capacity to do what we have always done… and that may not quickly change. But that crooked line can be straightened into a proclamation of trusting that God is working here through each of us.

I will be praying for all of you, and for God's guidance for the church. And Laura and I will certainly welcome your prayers for us as we journey. May we encounter God's blessings in our sabbath journey together apart. Pastor Eric

From the Pastor’s Study – December 2021/January 2022

“Welcome! Have you got any beer?” That’s said to have been the greeting that Squanto offered to the Pilgrims as he met them. He would become one of their lifelines after that first horrendous winter.

This year’s Thanksgiving marks the 400th anniversary of the occasion when our forebearers gathered for a thanksgiving meal after that deadly first year that had taken the lives of 50 of the 102 people who had set out on the Mayflower. They had finally managed to make a treaty with the Indigenous People (Ousamequin of the Pokanoket Wampanoag) and had managed to grow enough food and build enough shelter to think that they might survive. The Pilgrims’ religious practice was to gather for a feast of thanksgiving to God for the blessings. The stories always gather the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag together to share in a feast that many historians now say almost certainly didn’t happen as we’ve imagined it… but there was a gathering, and sharing, and thanksgiving.

Those Pilgrims are our UCC ancestors who, for my family growing up, were always a very present part of the Thanksgiving table. My ancestors trace their roots back to the immigrants on the Anne in 1623 (and Laura’s family on the Mayflower in 1620). The Congregational branch of the UCC traces back to those Pilgrim’s Puritan roots that sought to purify the church from the tradition that had emerged as the state religion: the Church of England (until 1534 England was a Roman Catholic nation, when King Henry VIII broke from Rome and declared himself head of the new national church). The Puritans wanted to reform the Church to get back to a simpler faith that was more aligned with the early Christians. Another group, the Separatists, wanted to break from the Church of England completely. Such are our roots – that commitment to return more closely to the ways of Christ and the early Christians instead of the trappings of the church or the ways that culture leads us from Christ’s ways of justice and love.

It’s interesting that it’s only been in the last couple of decades that I’ve started hearing Squanto and the Pilgrims’ story a little more deeply. “Welcome, have you got any beer?” is a greeting that could make any Wisconsinite smile. But most of us don’t remember why this Indigenous Person would offer this greeting. The greeting belies a sober story of Squanto knowing how to speak English and knowing of the blessings of beer because of his having been captured and enslaved. Enslavement allowed him to learn English and perhaps even be baptized prior to finding his way back to a land that would be renamed Plymouth – a land where his tribe had been all but wiped out by the diseases brought by earlier visits of Europeans. It’s interesting to consider how the survival of even the Pilgrims was dependent on this fruit of slavery and the inadvertent extermination by disease of the Indigenous Peoples. 

Part of what’s interesting to me is that these Pilgrims who were trying to purify their faith practices were clearly still having a hard time letting Jesus lead them into a relationship with God that was beyond their deep-seated cultural assumptions. This is always the case for us. We want to hear good news of God's love, but maybe only to the extent that it reinforces what we already believe. But that’s not the full message of the good news.

Very quickly our season moves from Thanksgiving to Christmas. We might move from giving thanks for the blessings of our lives and this year, to pondering what new stories we need to learn to truly be thankful for our lives and to be more closely aligned to God's ways.

Perhaps the journey toward Christmas might help us to be more open to God's challenge to grow with each day. As we hear “Away in the manger, no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head…” we might hear not only the magic of Christmas but also the challenge that this gift of God's love offered the world. It should be a little stunning to us when we stop and remember what scripture’s story of that first Christmas must have sounded like. Everything about the narrative is shocking, disruptive, perhaps even offensive!

John Dominic Crossan writes about how Jesus’ miraculous birth was a story that had roots in the culture of the time. He describes how the Roman Emperors would also have had miraculous birth narratives told about them in order to emphasize their power and importance, their divine sanction. But Jesus’ story took an outrageous, radical, twist away from the norm. Jesus’ story was the counter cultural divine birth story. Instead of his being born in all the powerful, auspicious, culturally celebrated, and acceptable ways; Jesus was born with a tenuous paternity, to a low caste single mother in a stable in the shadow of the empire. He was a nobody who was God's anointed. All of the titles that were used for Caesar Augustus: Divine, Son of God, God from God, Lord, Savior of the World, Redeemer, Liberator…; all of these terms were now shifted to this Jewish peasant child. Christianity hardly started in a place where the dominant culture would carry the story. No, the dominant culture found the story absurd and then offensive or threatening enough that Jesus’ birth precipitated his crucifixion. You don’t live a life that would dismantle the current cultural values without there being consequences.

Thanksgiving, Christmas, a New Year… God's story is inviting us to a place of growth, to a place of love, to a place of hope.

Christians have almost always been a part of the culture that much more closely resembles the powerful empire that Jesus was trying to transform than the community to which the Christmas story was made real. We take the message of a different way of being and turn it into cute, commercialized holidays that challenges none of our ways and only reinforce the brokenness of the world instead of transforming it with love.

We should hear the proclamation that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” as a word of profound hope in a world that continues to be wracked with discord, distrust, and fear. That little child is born in all the wrong places proclaiming a different way. That light is Love that is humble and giving, that sees in the other not fear but hope and promise. The Christmas story is a gift that God offers us to draw us out of our cultural comfort zone to welcome the unpredictable divine.

May God bless us this season!

From the Pastor's Study - November 2021

And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

- Genesis 2:2-3

    It is hard for me to believe that I’m in the midst of my 24th year as the pastor at Peace UCC. As such we are busy at church planning for an upcoming Sabbatical. This will be the first time that I have taken this time on schedule, and only the second time that I’ll take the time in full. I had initially hoped that we would be fully on the other side of the pandemic by the time that I would be stepping away for several months, but it seems like we might be on that journey for some time yet.  Thankfully we have settled into a much more normal pattern than where we were a year ago. For some of you the concept of Sabbatical may be new, and so I’m always aware that there is some work to do in order to help understand what this word means. Functionally it means that the church will be giving me a paid leave from my duties for 4 months (3 months plus some unused time from the last sabbatical).

    When I began my ministry at Peace we were encouraged to follow the guidelines offered to us by the Conference Office to institute a sabbatical policy. The congregation took that leap of faith and implemented a sabbatical policy: “Sabbatical of three months, in addition to vacation, during the sixth year of service, and every sixth year following, per conference guidelines.”

    I offer what I wrote before my first Sabbatical as still appropriate: “Sabbaticals are recommended as an essential part of keeping clergy attuned to their call and service to God. There is an awareness of the extraordinarily high potential for burnout in the ministry. It is ironic that ministry, as a caring vocation, often does such a poor job of teaching ministers to care for themselves. Even something as simple as having the chance to be a part of a worshipping community instead of always leading worship challenges the pastor to keep Sabbath time. A Sabbatical is an extended Sabbath offered for spiritual renewal, rejuvenation, intellectual growth. Its roots are in God's vision of Sabbath time.

    We all know the command to keep the Sabbath holy. The gifted theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a profound book on Sabbath, poetry of faith. He offers us an image of Sabbath as a cathedral in time. At its foundation Sabbath is intended to be a different way of being than the other six days of the week. Heschel recalls how the ancient rabbis looked at the seventh day of creation and noted that it was not an absence of creation, but something more, something different. For six days God created the heavens and the earth, all of the stuff of the universe. So after six days of creation what did the universe lack? Their answer: Menuha, a Hebrew word that is often simply translated as rest but its connotations are much more powerful, much more positive than mere rest. On the seventh day God created tranquility, serenity, peace and repose. On the seventh day God created a cathedral in time into which we are invited to be with God in glory and praise and prayer. The poetry of our creation story has all of creation culminate in this seventh day. The Sabbath is the finale, the perfection of creation. This was a unique idea in the ancient world just as it is today. Only the Jews worked in order to enter into the sanctity of rest with their God. The Egyptian slaves rested only in order to recover to do more work in the following days.

    Work to rest or rest to work, that difference is all the difference in the world. How many of us “keep the Sabbath?” How many of us truly set aside that time to enter into relationship with God as the very goal of the other six days of our week?

    Sabbath also means enough, this is the time when we are opened to encounter the fullness of God's creation. This is not the proclamation that comes in frustration at the end of a hard week, “enough already!” but this is the proclamation of a sufficiency that can only be experienced as the bounty God offered to creation, “ah, it is enough!!”

    Isn’t it interesting how we have moved back into the old patterns of Egyptian slavery rushing from one thing to the next always trying to just keep up? As I plan for time away, time with God, I must confess that there is a certain dread that overcomes me. I know how to keep doing what I’m doing; I’m not so sure I know how to enter into God's cathedral-in-time to be restored. Of course at the same time, I’m growing to clearly understand the wisdom of Sabbatical, I am feeling the desperate need to recharge and reclaim that fire with which God called me to ministry. I cannot help but think that we all have much to gain from this experience.”

    My prayer is that this will become a time for all of us to discern how God is calling each of us to live out our faith. It is a chance to break some well-worn patterns, to hear some new voices, and I pray to let the time be a sacred time of imagination. When I think of that opportunity, this seems like a perfect time to listen together for where God is calling us to go as a congregation.

    I have watched many pastors and congregations that have experienced sabbaticals together. Most of what I hear are stories about how the experience proved to be a real blessing for everyone involved, congregation and pastor. It was not undertaken as struggle or burden but as opportunity for all involved. It is to embrace the manuha for which God made all of creation.

    We will embark on this sabbatical together. That may sound a bit strange as I make plans to be away and you will all be here, but we will do this together. All of us are called to open our eyes to new experiences, new preaching and teaching, new opportunities for people to step up to claim the ministry to which we are each called. I pray that it may be a time when we all are reminded to listen a little more clearly for God's voice in our lives.

    Shabbat shalom,

Pastor Eric