REJOICE!

Our bulletin this past Sunday greeted us with a command: “Rejoice!” In other words, be glad, celebrate the goodness of God and the life we have been given. This coming Sunday’s psalm, Psalm 98, proclaims that when God’s justice and mercy are evident and obvious to all, all God’s people will rejoice, all the people of the world will rejoice, and all of creation will rejoice. The presence of God in the world draws praise and joy out of everything and everyone.This only reinforces the direction we were given last Sunday from the outset: “Rejoice!”

Installations

The word “install” is a verb which means “to put in place for service,” such as installing an appliance or software. But it can also apply to a person, such as installing a new fire chief. The noun “installation” is something that has been installed. A week ago today, I attended the opening of an installation. It was called “Murals of Hope” and it is found at Temple De Hirsch Sinai. A year ago last Friday someone entered the Synagogue’s property and desecrated a wall with antisemitic rants. This had happened before to another part of the wall. That time they recruited art students from the Northwest School to re-consecrate a desecrated space by painting a mural over it. Now some years later they recruited three institutions—Wing Luke Museum, The Bush School, and Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences—to do the same. Both murals complement each other with images of life, growth, hope, and promise.

Young Adults Gather

This past Sunday, fourteen of us gathered after church for what we generously called our “Young Adult Gathering.” Since some of us are within striking distance of forty, we’ll be rebranding ourselves soon. While we’re still deciding what to call our cohort, we did decide that it was good for us to gather, so we plan to do that more. We talked about our hopes for this group, as well as our general hopes for the future of First Covenant Church. 

I was inspired and encouraged by the energy of these people and how seriously they take their call to steward the church’s future. They had lots of ideas for how First Cov could better reach our neighborhood and provide for those who are already in our community. I’m excited to see how this group will coalesce and how their influence will shape the future of our congregation. 

Being a Good Neighbor

One of the tasks our Church Council has been working on since the first of the year has been doing an audit of the fiscal (dollars spent) and human (people-hours spent) resources it takes to do all we do as a church. For a congregation our size, we do a great deal more than one might think. Our Church Chair Karl Nelson describes it a “punching above our weight class.” I agree, we are a talented, resourceful, and scrappy bunch. Still, there are many needs in our immediate community and our wider world, and we can only do so much to address those needs. One thing we can do is to be informed about opportunities to help and serve offered by those outside our church. Even if we don’t actually contribute to their efforts, we can pray for them—prayers of thanks for these efforts and the people who make them, as well as prayers of intercession for their efforts to be fruitful and productive.

Voices from Holy Week and Easter

The holy eight days (or octave) from Palm Sunday to Easter at First Covenant Church were evidently quite noteworthy; at least from the voices I heard. Maybe you heard them too?

Here are few selected examples.

Palm Sunday: “What glorious music we had today. Our choir has been such a grace to us these past weeks.” “It was so good to have the children up front singing!”

Maundy Thursday: “I’ve never had my feet washed before.” “The choir’s anthem during the foot washing and watching others have their feet washed was a sacred moment.”

On this good, holy Friday

It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Having said this, he breathed his last.

~ Luke 23:44-46

Palms, Passion, Confusion, and celebrating Holy Week

Jerusalem was an important location for Christian pilgrimages in the early centuries. Christians would especially flock to Jerusalem in the week prior to Easter, as the church of Jerusalem enacted the last week of Jesus’ life in Jerusalem in the places where they believed they took place. Those practices of this week in Jerusalem gave rise to what we now know as Holy Week and the Stations of the Cross. By the 300s, Holy Week was being celebrated well beyond Jerusalem and became a time of fasting, donations to the church and to the needy, and extended times of prayer.

Exorcising in Lent

Exorcism is the stuff of Halloween movies. The words “exorcism” and “exorcist” conjure images of priests going toe to toe with a demon—or demons—armed only with a crucifix, consecrated oils, and a prayer book. In Mark’s gospel, casting out demons is a core element in Jesus’ ministry of proclaiming the good news and offering evidence that Jesus is bringing the reign of God to earth. But that seldom comes to mind when hearing the word “exorcism.”

Getting the Straight Story on Forgiveness and Reconciliation

Then Peter came and said to Jesus, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18: 21-22)

Peter came to Jesus with a question, “Teacher, when are we done forgiving a person?” and Jesus responded, “Never.” Peter was looking at forgiveness as an obligation, social, religious, and moral. It was Jewish law, after all; and, at some point you meet the obligation of the law, right? But Jesus said, “No.”

History and Our Human Natures

In such a rapidly changing world, is our reliance on the ancient texts of scripture still relevant?

For any scripture text that we read, we could replace it with a much more recent—and possibly more directly relevant—theological text, but would its authority be enduing? How do we know what this particular writing by a scripture scholar or theologian will have a lasting importance in our lives? The scriptures had their divine authority vetted many centuries ago, and have since been read as a “canon” or the rule of faith for God’s people. One of the reasons we read ancient texts every time we gather for worship is that they speak of our humanity in all its diversity in ways that still speaks truth to our lives. A sign that as much as our human contexts have changed across time and around the world, our human natures remain remarkably the same.

Lent and Keeping Score

On Tuesday night, August 17, 1971, I attended my first major league baseball game. It was the Angels playing the Red Sox at Fenway. We sat in the right field bleachers behind the Red Sox bullpen. It was such a treat to see all of those players who I had collected as baseball cards playing live in front of me. It was also the night my cousin Adrian taught me how to keep score. It changed my life. Soon I would be creating score sheets on legal pads and then keep score of the games I watched on television. It made me so much more engaged in the game helping me follow the game and its strategy better. I still like keeping score. Ask our church’s softball manager, Aaron Nilson, how often I volunteer to “keep the book.”

A New Season

This week marks the first week of Pastor Lauren St. Martin among us. This is a bit misleading as Lauren has graciously contributed to the ministry of our church in a variety of ways—some public, some less so—over the past few years, but does so now as one of our pastors. Still, even as pastor, Lauren and I have been laying the groundwork for our ministry together. In particular, we have been thinking about what changes we might like to make in this new season of ministry in our church.

February: A Month in Transition

Some people really don’t like winter. I personally love winter. It is my favorite season. I miss winters in the northern Allegheny Mountains, which is found in the snow belt between Erie, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York. Though I took advantage of Southern California’s mild winters by biking and other warm weather activities, I missed real winter weather. Seattle has a more wintery climate (though I am still waiting for my first opportunity to shovel snow this year), but not quite wintry enough. I have on a rare occasion gone east to cross-country ski and skated at the Northgate ice rink, but far less than I would like.

Praying through Lent

As we have done in the past, I am inviting our congregation to participate in a “do-it-yourself” Lenten devotional. This year I have chosen Matthew’s gospel as the foundation for our devotions. We spent last year with Mathew’s gospel in our worship and I am hoping those texts might be fresh in your minds. Specifically, I have chosen small passages from the Sermon on the Mount and invite you to offer a short prayer that this text inspires in you. That will take us to the last two weeks in Lent, where the texts will shift to some of Jesus' teachings as he was approaching the Cross. The texts will be different, but the assignment is the same. Offer a short prayer that arises out of your response to this passage. We are inviting you to sign up to both receive these as an email each weekday in Lent as well as volunteer to write a short prayer. (A sample of what these will look like is below.)

Another Postcard from your Pastor

We have returned from a brief but immersive few days in Paris. There we found ourselves at the tail-end of “Fashion Week” in Paris, encountering moments of celebrity and fanatic responses to it. We also found locations such as the Opera House and the Champs-Élysées filled with people, as well as cafés overflowing with conversation and crowds. We saw a luminated, glistening Eiffel Tower by night, giving evidence of why Paris is called the “City of Light.” And though we found many evidences of Christendom in the many churches and the saint-names streets we passed by, we saw less evidence of a living faith as the light in that city.

Postcard from your Pastor

After two full days in England with our daughter Kelsey, a University College London student, Susan and I visited Cambridge, had a “punting” tour of the University colleges, saw a first edition (1611) King James Bible at Great St. Mary’s Church, saw St. Edward’s church where Robert Barnes preached the first Reformation sermon in England on Christmas Eve 1526, saw the site of the Wesley’s early preaching in London, prayed at choral Evensong services at King’s College Chapel (Cambridge) and St. Paul’s Cathedral (London), had fika in London at Fabrique (a great Swedish bakery in NYC, London, and Stockholm), and made some wonderful musical discoveries at Sister Ray’s Records.

Winners, Losers, and the Image and Likeness of God

When our children were young, after we moved from South Bend, Indiana to Chicago, autumn would bring our thoughts back to Notre Dame and football. We were fairly avid Irish fans. If Notre Dame suffered a loss (unfortunately often back then) I would tell our children, “We don’t need to go to church tomorrow. Notre Dame lost; there must be no God.”

Then Sunday morning would come and I would wake them up and say, “The sun is up and it’s a new day, God is obviously alive and well. Time to get ready for church.” Of course, this was a way to put such events and their outcomes in eternal perspective. Truth be told, it was as much for myself as for them.

Hope for our New Year

I write this near the end of my time at a conference I have attended almost every year for three decades. It is a gathering of scholars, artists, pastors, hymn-writers, architects, and church leaders. Most come from North America, though some are here from places around the globe: various places in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, to name a few. What we all have in common is a love for, and commitment to, the faith life and worship of our Christian and Jewish communities.

New Year’s Resolutions

Some people have a practice of making goals for the new year, and then resolve to accomplish them. The people who study such things have determined that most people lose momentum to their resolve by mid-February and very few see their plan through to the end of the year.

On December 16 our Council and Staff gathered for a retreat to assess where we are as a church and what we might accomplish between now and the semi-annual meeting in June, when some of our council members will conclude their final term. These are not quite “new year’s resolutions” but instead an attempt to set targets for our work in the first half of the coming year. These are three we chose to focus upon.

The constant in the midst of the mayhem

Over the centuries and through the years, the celebration of Christmas, inside and outside of Christian churches, has changed—and continues to change. Over the centuries and through the years, Christmas has been celebrated in seasons of war and peace, feast and famine, plague and health, hope and hopelessness. But through it all the message of God’s love and salvation remains the same.