Beloved of God,

The month of March finds us smack dab in the middle of the Lenten journey, and with early signs of spring emerging all around us after the warmest winter on record it’s hard to miss the connection to Lent as “springtime of the soul.” The hymn by Delores Dufner makes that connection explicit as it invites us to prepare the rich, dark soil of our hearts to receive the seed of God’s word this season; to become hospitable and welcome hosts for the “grain God bent to sow.”

From meetings with families preparing for their child’s baptism, to elementary retreats at Lutherwood; from our LEGACY celebration March 7th to the Palm Sunday’s choral cantata, No Greater Sacrifice; from weekly webinars on neighborhood outreach to the Spring Cleaning workday and Family Promise Fundraiser on March 20th, we’re all about rooting more deeply the “grain God bent to sow.”

One of my former professors died last month – Loren Halvorson, who taught at Luther Northwestern Seminary when I was a student. I found myself in his “church and society” course when I was a senior.  In that seminary world where heady theological concepts and conversations tended to predominate, Loren’s lectures and the projects he required from us opened up a whole new world grounded in that place where seeds meet soil.  Loren was all about Christian praxis—faith based action at the nexus of Word and world, and the “infinite loop” linking our worship life (ALTAR) with our vocational life in the world (STREET).  He brought the social-ethical conversation, i.e. how the church engages concretely in the world, into sharp focus for a generation of students, and his keen intellect was always imagining new ways that the church could incarnate the lively and powerful presence of the gospel in the world.

Loren and his wife Ruth founded ARC (a play on the biblical image forming an acronym standing for: Action – Reflection – Celebration) an intentional Christian Community north of the Twin Cities.  The cedar log structure they built there with the volunteer labor and ongoing investment of many hands, hearts, and pocketbooks, was an early retreat place for my family when I was a student; providing a welcome respite where spiritual reflection, personal story telling, spirited theological conversation, wholesome foods, and manual labor provided a welcome balance to those who sojourned there.  Thirty years later, some of the recipes I picked up from the ARC kitchen continue to make their way to our dinner table.

During the final months of Loren’s life, his wife Ruth wrote a blog on the Caring Bridge website that went out to a large audience of family members, friends, colleagues and former students.  It was moving for me to receive Ruth’s nightly journal entry, and to feel through those entries that I was sitting at bedside with a teacher who had spent a good deal of his life awakening others to God’s presence in the world and who now, in his final days, was teaching us how to die.  What a legacy! Ruth’s January 30th entry included these words:

On our dining room table we have a bowl of flower bulbs sitting in water with rocks, sprouting roots and green shoots.  Since there is no soil, nourishment comes from the bulb itself.  Similarly, with food intake having been almost nil for Loren these past couple of months or more, he is drawing from his stored reserves to keep his body going and mind active. He remains content and grateful.  Tonight I would like to close with a quote from Albert Einstein printed on a beautiful card we received that says it all, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”

Jesus taught his disciples, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)  As seeds and blossoms emerge from soil and bulb and open up their colorful and fragrant blossoms they are visible reminders of the truth Jesus spoke.  But the order is clear:  death first, then…life!

During Lent, God dares us to trust that when we enter fully into the life of his Son—the singing, laughing, crying Jesus—and open the deep, dark soil of our lives to him, his transforming presence will bear fruit in our lives; will bring new breath and life; will reconnect what has become disconnected; will unbind and free us from whatever entombs us.

Is it possible, amidst the busy fullness of this month’s calendar, that our gatherings around Word and Sacrament could become occasions for the Spirit of God to “touch and mend and rouse our dry bones from their grave”? That’s where my hope is invested!

Pastor Erik

“Jesus took with him Peter and John and James and went up on the mountain to pray.  And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white….a cloud came and overshadowed them; and thy were terrified as they entered the cloud.  Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” ~ Luke 9:28-29, 34-35

Beloved of God,

February has arrived, bringing its own peculiar character.  The “newness” of the New Year has run its course.  Personal notions we may have had about making a new start have begun to prove themselves to be either possible or unlikely.  Collective decisions about mission goals and budgets have been made and now we begin the step by step journey of living them out.  And in the garden, crocus shoots offer a harbinger of spring.  February represents a turning point in the seasons of our faith life together as we move this year from the season of Light to the season of Lent.

The season of Epiphany comes to a climax on Transfiguration Sunday, February 14^th as Jesus and three companions go mountain climbing and their dazzling encounter on top nearly leaves the disciples speechless.  God speaks and the disciples listen, but still don’t quite catch the drift.   How do you explain mystery?  Words fail.

After this high point, we move into Lent, the springtime of the soul. Entrance into Lent begins with the Ash Wednesday service (Feb 17), reminding us of our mortality, and how our destiny, our dying and rising, is linked to Christ in baptism. Forty days of reflection and meditation begin as we follow Jesus into the wilderness.  There he again ascends to the mountaintop.  Only this time it is Satan who accompanies him.  He promises Jesus the world, but Jesus sees through the charade.   How about you and I?  Can we see through the empty promises with which Satan would lure and entice us into empty and dead-end thoughts, actions, and relationships?

In the ancient church, Lent was a time of intense preparation for those who were to be baptized into Christ at the Easter Vigil.  This rhythm of preparation is being reclaimed in congregations that practice the Catechumenate, a way and a process for accompanying those who are drawn to Christ and to the waters of baptism—either to be baptized for the first time or to affirm their baptisms.  A group of us who attended a Catechumenate training event recently at Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church are exploring what such a process might look like at Peace.  You’ll be hearing about an opportunity soon.

The season of Lent is a season for gaining clarity:  clarity about our bond with Christ in baptism; clarity about our lifelong call as Christians to discover God’s will for our lives; clarity about the power which is God’s gift to us through the Holy Spirit; clarity about our mission as a community of faithful people who have been marked with the cross forever.  As we follow Christ on his road through the wilderness and on to Jerusalem and all that awaits him there, we learn once again of the height and depth of his love for us and for all.

How will you enter this “springtime” of the soul?  One of the traditions of Lent is to simplify, to pare down to the bare essentials.  Fasting, prayer, acts of charity are traditional practices during this season.  Some folks simplify their lives in Lent by choosing one thing to let go of or give up, such as an unhealthy habit.  Others choose to add on to their routine a spiritual discipline or a giving of themselves in some other form.  The options and opportunities for spiritual growth during this “springtime” are endless.

How about you?  How will this season be marked within the rhythm of your life?   Whatever our choices, we can be assured that God’s Spirit accompanies us, within and without, just as Christ promised; coaxing and guiding us toward a deeper dependence upon God and a more accepting relationship with our neighbors.

May God’s accompaniment bring joy, peace, and accompaniment to your Lenten journey.

Pastor Erik

The Pastor’s Pen

Jesus unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the bind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” ~ Luke 4:16-19

Servants of God,

Each New Year brings its own assortment of hopes and dreams and goals, and when it’s over we look back at them and begin evaluating how well (or not) the year lived up to its promise.  We go through this process as individuals and we do it as a congregation, too.  On January 31^st we will stand on that crossroads of past and future once more and make decisions about where and how God is prompting us to go in this New Year and decade.  Some level of fear and trembling accompanies the discernment process leading up to the annual meeting every year (as it should!) for we dare to say, as a community “We believe God’s Spirit is calling us to do X.” What do we base the “X” upon?  We are a community of the baptized, and because of who and whose we are, we look to the gospel of Jesus to shape our mission agenda in the world.

The passage above comes from Jesus’ first hometown sermon.  The quotation is from the prophet Isaiah.  The words are a forceful declaration of how Jesus intends to fulfill his God given mission.  And the reaction he gets?  The reaction moves from congratulations to critique to violent intention.  By the time he leaves the synagogue the congregation is ready to throw him off a cliff!  Yikes! Jesus, it seems, did not fulfill their expectations.  He did not come to endorse the status quo but to call God’s people to a radical reorientation around God’s mission—what God is up to in the world. Adopting that mission plan eventually cost him his life, and simultaneously seeded new life for you and me and all.

On January 17^th we will celebrate the life and legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who inspired us with a dream for racial equality that beckons us still today; a man who taught us that racism belittles both the perpetrator and victim alike; a man who showed us that non-violent resistance to injustice has a moral force that violent means can never match; who said, “The arc of history is long—and it bends toward justice.”

It was a different brother Martin who warned of the propensity of human communities to become “curved in” on themselves when confronted with life’s challenges.  The gospel of Jesus, this Martin said, compels us always to turn our vision ever outward toward the welfare of our neighbor.

Charlie Mays, my pastor during seminary years, who served Christ’s church in the Northwest for decades and whose death one year ago left many of us bereft, liked to say provocative things about the role of the church.  Like: the church is the only organization that gives itself away for the sake of those who are not its members.

When we review our congregational life on January 31st, and get caught up in discussions and decisions about budget line items, salaries, and how we will fund our mission, we do well to remember the larger purpose to which we have been called in Christ, and the gifts with which God has blessed and equipped us.  We do well to recall the long arc of God’s salvation story, which reaches out to us in God’s Word-made-flesh and pulls us toward a future characterized by hope and fulfillment, a future that is unfolding even now in our lives and in the lives of all whom we serve.

Blessed New Year!

Pastor Erik

The Pastor’s Pen

The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.”   ~ Luke 1:30-31

Servants of God,

Sometimes, progress toward a goal is measured in seconds. With the Winter Olympic Games coming soon to Vancouver, BC, I think of the pending competitions where seconds or even fractions of seconds will mark the distance between medalists and also-rans.

Sometimes, progress is measure in terms of months—nine months, in the case of the young Mary. (We’ve had a number of families measuring time that way this year!) A reasonable length of time to prepare home and heart(h) to receive a new life…or maybe not.  By turns those weeks may drag on, or race forward with a swiftness that leaves parents-to-be breathless, with half-finished baby preparations dogging their heels.

Sometimes, progress is measured in decades. “Four score years,” the Psalmist declared, is a generous interval for human life.  My parents both crossed that threshold in 2009, and some of you are approaching or have exceeded that mark.

But sometimes, progress toward a goal is measured not on any human scale at all. Take geologic time.  The time it took the Colorado River to carve the Grand Canyon.  The time it took the slow motion collision of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian Plates to produce the Himalayan Mountains.  The time it took the earth’s primordial land mass known as “Pangaea” (from the Greek pan = entire + gaia = earth) to spread out across the globe becoming seven distinct continents.

Within the cycle of seasons we call the church year, Advent is here once more, and with Advent comes the invitation to expectant waiting as we look forward to the fulfillment of God’s plan to unite heaven and earth under the gentle rule of our Savior Jesus Christ.  The first generation of Christians expected the fruition of God’s plan in their life times.  The delay of Christ’s much anticipated return was the subject of deep conversation among the congregations Paul founded and corresponded with, and by the time the gospels were written one can see how this “delay” challenged the faith of some.  Two thousand years later, we still await the fullness of God’s promised redemption.  How we wish that God would abandon this infernally slow timeline and adopt ours instead!

Enter Pierre Teihard De Chardin (1881-1955), a Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist and paleontologist, who combined his knowledge of the earth’s origins, and his studies of early humans with his faith in a divine Creator to produce some of the most imaginative and forward thinking theology of the 20^th century.  De Chardin once wrote:

If Chardin is right, (and the evidence seems to point in that direction!) God is not the least in a hurry.  John Haught, professor of theology at Georgetown University, illustrated this point powerfully in a presentation I attended earlier this year.  Imagine that each one of the Universe’s 13.7 billion years was contained in 30 volumes, and that each volume had 450 pages; and that each of those pages represented 1 million years.

Using this analogy, the Big Bang constitutes the first letter of the first word on the first page of Volume 1.  But it isn’t until Volume 21 that the earth itself is completely formed, and in Volume 22 that the first forms of life emerge.  In Volume 29 we find the so-called Cambrian explosion of new species and complex animals.  Dinosaurs don’t make their entrance until Volume 30, the final book, and become extinct on page 385.  Most startling of all, modern humans like you and I only appear on the last paragraph or so of the last page of the last volume.

God is most decidedly patient with the unfolding of this vast universe. We have no idea how many volumes God plans, but the witness of Scripture is that the Universe is moving toward a goal, an end (telos), and that this end is, finally, seeded with hope.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.” This is Advent’s invitation. That’s what Mary did, and it in a burst of insight that can only be a gift of the Spirit, she caught a glimpse of the Divine trajectory of hope within the human story—within her story—and it rang out from her soul in a lyric of such crystal clarity that we’ve never forgotten it, or her.  [Luke 1:46-55, The Magnificat, see below.**]

In what is often the most frenetic season of the year, the words of De Chardin and the song of Mary are worth holding onto: A God of immense patience calling us into sympathetic patience with ourselves and with each other as the “spirit gradually forming within” us, and God’s hope for this world, are revealed.

O, Come, O, Come, Emmanuel!

Pastor Erik

**When a divine messenger approached Mary about God’s plan to bring Jesus into the world through her, she also learned of her cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Luke records what happened next:

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” And Mary said,