Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. – James 5:7

To Those Who Await Immanuel,

As we begin December the pace of our community life and our personal lives gets turned up a notch.  There’s always more going on that we can reasonably expect to be a part of!  The modern world has done everything in its power to make the countdown to Christmas into a frenetic free-for-all, coaxing us on hectic shopping outings, sowing the seeds of unreasonable expectation, encouraging us to believe that material goods can satisfy spiritual hungers.  Infused in all this in times of economic stress is the sense that we’ll never reach these expectations or match our experiences of the past.

News out of Portland last week of the foiled plot of a radicalized young Somali immigrant to detonate a bomb at Portland’s annual Christmas Tree lighting event adds an additional layer of fear to the season this year.  And as conflicts continue unabated around the world, and the enormous costs of war—by every measure—continue to rise, there is a mounting sense of the intractability of the challenges facing our nation and world.  Oh! That God would hasten the day when swords are beaten into plowshares and nations study war no more! (Isaiah 2:4)

Where is the antidote to this death-dealing mixture of consumerism, fear, and longing to be found?  The response to this question, for people of faith, begins with our worship life during Advent.  Gathering under the promises of God in Christ, we are summoned to hear God’s word of hope and then to act as people possessed by that hope.  Good hymnody helps us get there. One of the newer Advent hymns to which I’m drawn speaks honestly and powerfully about our human experience and the promise which keeps hope alive.  Written by William Gay, it reads:[1]

That “YET” at the beginning of the third verse is the fulcrum upon which our life as people of faith turns; that “YET” is Christ. The world tells us that the present, as uncertain as it is, is more certain than the future; that the future is up for grabs; therefore, get all you can while the getting’s good.  But the revelation of God in the Scriptures is that the future is held firmly in the grasp of the Lord of Love!  Because this is so, we can live each day of the volatile present time fully and confidently in the light of Christ’s coming reign.  Placing our trust in the God who owns the future, we find our present, too, transformed; tentativeness and fear are transmuted into confidence, peace, and joy.  Being grounded in such hope as this is the only real antidote to today’s anxieties and compulsions.

As we make and carry out holiday plans and gather with family and special friends, let us choose to keep Christ at the center of our Christmas celebrations, our eyes ever drawn to the mystery and wonder of the holy Child within the manger—God with us—now, and to the end of the ages.

Your servant in hope,

Pastor Erik

[1] Text: William Gray, alt. Music: Annabeth Gay © 1971 United Church Press.  Published in With One Voice, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995) hymn #628.

Beloved of God,

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

As a young man in Minnesota, I loved venturing out during the wildest storms Mother Nature could conjure.  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.  After such a foray, returning to the light and warmth of home and hearth was a revelation.  Ah!  What grace!  What wonder!  What gratitude!  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.

In his potent little book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Life of Vocation, Parker Palmer writes:

Palmer has the Scriptures on his side.  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 “journey toward joining the human race.” 

In the dwindling light of November we mark two feast days: All Saints Sunday, in which we recall the legacy of folks—some of whom we know—who kept the faith often through dark and turbulent times and often despite their own failures and misgivings; and Christ the King Sunday.  Ironically, the gospel text which founds our faith in Christ’s reign is the scene of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Suspended helplessly between heaven and earth, suffering, bleeding, suffocating; surrounded by mockers who can’t get enough of this comeuppance, Jesus is the antithesis of a king. Yet, even as hope vanishes and darkness descends, Jesus speaks “promise” to the shadowy criminal whose life, like his own, is about to meet an ignoble end.  “Today,” Jesus promises, “you will be with me in Paradise.” [Luke 22:43]

We don’t 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 “shadowy parts” of his life before he could come to that “center, full of light,” which was his true vocation. 

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.  He has experienced human darkness in its fiercest forms.  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—to hell and back.  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. 

Blessings on the way,

Pastor Erik

And the Lord said…will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?  Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to him.  And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? ~ Luke 18:6-8

How hard it is to offer an unequivocal YES! to God’s invitation to entrust our lives completely to him, to being Christ to our neighbor, to being the light on the hill. We like to keep our options open; to have an escape route ready in case things don’t work out.  We prefer to wait until all the data is in before we plant our feet and say “Here I stand.” The problem, of course, is that the data is never all in.  And so our “maybe” becomes “never.”

This month, on October 17th, we have an opportunity to say YES! to God and neighbor by becoming participants in Bread for the World’s Offering of Letters campaign.  Annually, the Bread for the World organization invites individuals, congregations and organizations to join together as advocates on a particular hunger related issue that impacts people in this country and around the world.  Folks are encouraged to exercise their faith and their citizenship by authoring letters to their congressional delegation in support of specific legislative initiatives.

This year the issue is taxes. (Yes, taxes.)  Specifically, changes in tax policies that address the growing poverty in the United States.  Nearly one in four children lives in a family that struggles to get enough to eat.  Because of rising unemployment, a record number of Americans are receiving help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly called food stamps).  But in spite of this, for most families, food stamps provide only enough food to get through the first three weeks of the month. Too often, parents must choose between paying the rent and providing food for their children.  That’s why Bread for the World is urging Congress to protect and strengthen the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. These tax credits are critical to helping families make ends meet, but they will expire this year.

Throughout the fall in the First Lessons in worship we have heard in the voices of the prophets God’s advocacy on behalf of the poor and vulnerable and God’s dismay over those who neglect them or bring them harm.  On October 17th, we will have the opportunity to educate ourselves about a specific issue, and then take action by putting pen to paper in a fundamental exercise of the rights and privileges of citizenship.  This is a first of us at Peace; an idea which grew out of the joint Peace/Calvary women’s retreat of last spring.  What a great opportunity to teach the next generations how to find and use their voices for the sake of our neighbors near and far.  I hope you’ll join us that day, beginning with an intergenerational gathering at 9:15 am in the fellowship hall.

Brueggemann’s prayer concludes:

Amen indeed!