Happy New Year!

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…”

~ Ecclesiastes 3:1

Seasons come and go, one leading to the next. People experience the same seasons differently depending where they are in the world. Summer in Seattle is winter in Sidney. But even in the same hemisphere, summer is Seattle is different than summer in Syracuse, different than summer in Atlanta, different than summer in Anchorage. 

Calendars developed around a people’s experience of the passing of time and its seasons. Calendars were originally local. But the Roman empire with its incredible expanse, codified a single calendar for all of its population. A calendar that in some respect we still use today. After all, July was for Julius Caesar, and August for Caesar Augustus, to name two months. Yet some people within the Roman empire continued to use their people’s calendar, especially for religious purposes. The Jews were one.

Early Christians kept much of the Jewish calendar. In Acts, Christians are constantly going to Jerusalem to keep Jewish feasts. The Christians preserved Jewish concepts such as a day starting at sunset, a seven-day week, and a Sabbath. Over time Christians redefined Jewish feasts, like Pentecost and Passover (originally Pasch, for us now, Easter), and transformed the Sabbath into the celebration of Resurrection (Emperor Constantine later made Sunday a “sabbath” day.)

Communion of Saints

We say in Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in the communion of saints.” When we say those words, we might think of that in abstract terms, such as all those coming “from east and west, and from north and south to sit at table in the kingdom of God” as we say as we approach Christ’s Table. It is conceptual, if not eschatological.

In the past weeks I have had a more immediate, concrete, palpable sense of that “communion.” The term communion comes from the Greek term koinonia.  Besides being translated as communion it is also translated as “participation” and “fellowship.” It literally translates as ‘joint sharing’, meaning to hold something in common. As followers of Christ, we share in, participate in, a common life though the Spirit.

That sort of joint sharing is the experience that Susan and I had with you all when we were joining the All Saints service online. The day before Susan’s mother, Violet Lyon, passed away. Almost exactly 24 hours after she passed, and in the same room, we joined our prayers with yours from miles away. It was a gift at that moment to be a virtual pew sitter with Susan for a change. It was also a gift to see you all again, to hear the names, even see the photos, of those being remembered. Susan and I both had the experience of being “at home” with you all. You are our church, our family of faith. It was an overwhelming sense of being a part of you all. We share a common life in Christ together with you. For this we are most grateful.

Lessons from an Evacuation

Last Sunday was quite eventful, and not in the ways we anticipated. If you weren’t in attendance, here’s a quick recap:

Halfway through the worship service, Sara Davis, our Nurture Faith chair, noticed a strong smell in the sanctuary. She immediately asked Allan Waite, our facilities manager, to come investigate. Smelling the same thing, he approached me up at the pulpit and said that we needed to evacuate for a potential gas leak. I informed the congregation and asked everyone to make their way to our gathering point at the corner of Bellevue and Pine. 

Thanks to our recent Sunday school teacher safety training, we had a very efficient evacuation. Those who were with children in the nursery, chapel, and youth room knew what to do, and all the children were evacuated in a matter of minutes. As long-time First Cov member and previous Nurture Faith chair Deeann Puffert said, “I was so pleased that this [safety training] resulted in a flawlessly executed evacuation by the teachers in our children and youth’s classrooms.”

Both the fire department and Puget Sound Energy arrived and worked with Allan to make sure the building was safe. In the end, there was no clear reason for the strong smell (which Allan described as a “wall of stink”). PSE told Allan that they get calls like this multiple times a day, so we’re not alone in this experience.

Adopt a Corner, a Ministry of Presence

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25: 37-40) 

A few Saturdays ago, I spent a couple hours with the day laborers at my neighborhood Home Depot. They graciously welcomed me with smiles and handshakes to their little corner of the massive parking lot where they wait, sometimes all day, hoping for work. (As a side note, the parable of the day laborers can also be found in Matthew!) They were kind as I practiced my rusty Spanish with them, and they shared their stories with me while we all stood out in the cold drinking coffee and eating pan dulce. I’d been invited to this corner by a man named Chris from Phinney Ridge Lutheran Church who’s been visiting these men weekly for months now. He knows the names of over 40 men who regularly show up at the Shoreline Home Depot. Chris volunteers with an organization called NDLON (National Day Laborer Organizing Network) through theirAdopt a Corner program, which provides a concrete way for neighbors to show solidarity with day laborers in their communities. 

All Saints Sunday

When Christianity expanded from the Middle East to Europe, it encountered people whose religious beliefs and practices were different than those in in the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures out of which it arose. In particular, the encounters with the Germanic people of Northern Europe, who invaded the Roman Empire leading to its collapse, and were later were introduced to the Christian faith by missionaries, forced Christianity to translate its faith with people of very different practices and beliefs. 

For Northern Europeans, like we in the Pacific Northwest, the month of November initiated a season of dark and became for them a season of death: a time to fear death and the spirits of the dead. Christian evangelists “baptized” this season by celebrating the hope of resurrection and proclaiming the victory over death that is given to the dead in Christ. This became the touchstone of what we now call “All Saints Day.” All Saints Day is commemorated November 1. We, like many churches, celebrate All Saints on the Sunday of or after November 1. It is a time we remember with fondness and grief those who have died since the last All Saints Sunday, as well as those whose deaths still leave an absence in our lives and hearts for more than just the past year.

Hope over Hate

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to attend an event just down the street at the Convention Center focused on confronting and reducing hate speech and hateful actions. It was a very different event than I was expecting. It was broad in its approach and appeal. It was informational and conversational, and at times inspirational. The event was organized primarily by the Anti-Defamation League, which is Jewish. Surprisingly, in tone and scope the program addressed not just antisemitism, but racism and any number of other ‘’-isms.” My table conversations revealed this was an interfaith and interracial gathering, broad in both its approach and its audience.

Benevolence

The word “benevolence” originates from a Latin word meaning “to wish (someone) well.” In the Fifteenth century, about 100 years before the Reformation, the French and English forms of this word took on a different meaning, “to be disposed to do good,” or “to be of good will.”Essentially it went from wishing someone well to doing something beneficial for others. In the not too distant past (though before I was on the scene) First Covenant had a Benevolence Offering. It was taken as a recessional offering on Sundays we celebrated the Lord’s Table. This is a common practice in churches, arising out of the fact that deacons—who in the book of Acts served people food, and later would serve people the Lord’s Supper—cared for the poor and the marginalized. (See Acts 6:1-6)

Partisan Piety?

This past weekend we had Dominique Gilliard, the Covenant’s Director of Racial Righteousness and Reconciliation as a guest of our church. While here, Dominique attended the Pilgrimage of Hope to the ICE Detention Center in Tacoma, reflected on how the prayer of Habakkuk speaks to us in this current season we are living through, and offered a biblical survey on the expectation of God’s people to be a witness to justice and mercy, while naming sin and injustice.

In the midst of his presentation, he offered a phrase that I have used more than once. Christian faith is political, but not partisan. The good way to understand that phrase is to think of it through the work of former North Park Seminary Ethics professor, Brent Laytham, whose teaching and writing often began with the phrase, “God is not…”. God is not a Republican, God is not a Democrat, God is not an American, God is not a Capitalist; to name a few. In other words, God is not like us: God doesn’t have a philosophical bias about politics, about economics, about denominations, or about nations. God loves and offers redemption to them all.

Noise and Silence, Isolation and Community

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” ~ W.B. Yeats

I began this week on a Silent Retreat at St. Martin’s Abbey in Lacey, Washington, nestled on a quiet corner of the campus of St. Martin’s University. My first spiritual experience with silence was a Silent Day in Advent 1988 at the parish of my then spiritual director. It was led by a monk who had recently founded a contemplative order. That was the first time I became palpably aware that I find God in quiet. Not necessarily solitude, but silence. Since that day I have been more and more intentional about finding times of silence each day, and to this day I begin my day by praying my morning prayers followed by contemplative prayer in the often dark quiet of the morning. That has become my spiritual baseline; everything else is built upon that.

Tis the Season

This is the first week of fall, the beginning of the autumnal days determined by a time the earth is neither tilted away from nor toward the sun. This is one of the two days each year when we have equal hours of daylight and darkness. This year that was September 22. There are other ways one could determine the onset of autumn. For example, fall could begin at the start of the college football season, in that case it began August 23 this year. You could think of it as the beginning of the new school year, but that could vary widely, even within a family. It might be better to go with the day Starbucks rolls out its “pumpkin spice” products, this year that was August 26, about the same as using college football as a reference.The point of all this is that we are in a transitional time from summer to fall, and each year there are many changes that take place in this transition. We see than and sense them, but pay little attention to them because they have become expected and familiar. One of them occurs in our worship. Our church follows the Revised Common Lectionary for the reading and preaching of the scriptures. This is an ecumenical resource used by Christian churches of all types all around the world. It was created by drawing from a number of prior lectionaries from various church traditions. In the late 1930s, a Protestant group in the United States known as the Federal Council of Churches suggested the creation of Kingdomtide as part of the church year. This was a name for the last months of the Pentecost season, otherwise known as fall. The season of Pentecost by itself lasts half of the year, this was half of that. It was named so because the texts in the latter half of the season of Pentecost focus less on the church in the power of the Holy Spirit, and more on the challenges and demands of being a follower of Christ bringing in the Kingdom. Often the texts, in particular the gospel texts, were hard—even harsh—to hear. Our current lectionary reflects this tradition as well.

What's in a word?

I was moving rather slowly on a parking-lot-like West Seattle Bridge while heading to First Covenant this week, when I noticed the company name on the van in front of me. The company’s name was “Brimstone Fire Safety Management.” Staring at this logo for some time made me think of what an attention getting name it was. One might say a hell of a name!

When I think of “brimstone” I think of “fire and brimstone” as a traditional description of hell. Brimstone comes from the old English word for “burning stone.” This word referred to sulfur in particular, a stone that burns and gives off a fairly strong, pungent odor. This is how it got its association with eternal damnation. That association is what made this company’s name grab my attention, much more so than “Sulfur Fire Safety Management” would have.

Children at Worship

This coming Sunday we will begin a new season in children’s worship at our church. After the children’s message, our children will process to the chapel behind the wall on the piano-side of our worship space. There they will continue to worship in parallel to the worship we will offer under the dome. Their offering will be a reflection of our worship in two ways.

1. We will follow the same structure. Almost all of our worship service follows this pattern: “We gather together, to hear God’s Word and to respond with our lives, in the places we now go.” Hopefully, this sentence is familiar to you all, as it is in our bulletin each Sunday. It is nothing less than a description of worship on the Lord’s Day for the earliest records to today—Gather, Word, Table (response), Dismissal. The children will leave in the middle of the liturgy of the Word, they will have their own reflection on the texts of the day, have their own response to the Word, and then be dismissed to return to their family and receive the benediction with us all.

Polity, God's People, and Impact

Last month Rev. Jonathan Barker, Pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha, Wisconsin resigned. Grace Lutheran after World War II was a robust church with over a thousand worshippers attending on a Sunday. Now Grace Lutheran typically has about 30 worshipers. Pastor Barker has served this congregation for 9 years. In August, Pastor Barker sent out a press release announcing that his sermon on Sunday would include an endorsement of sorts, encouraging Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York to run for president in 2028. His hope was, in part, to attract attention and possibly more people. Now Pastor Barker is no longer the pastor of Grace Lutheran.It appears that the Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA) has an ecclesial polity, or a form of church organization and structure, that gives the denomination a single tax-exempt status. If Grace Lutheran (or any ELCA church) were to be found to having broken tax law, the entire denomination and every church in it, would lose tax exempt status. You can learn more about this story here, but this story is not really the point of my thoughts today.

Bill Brehm and Stewardship

While on vacation I learned of the passing of Bill Brehm. It was not unexpected as he was 96, outliving his beloved wife of 70 years. Bill was known for many things: he worked in our federal government in a variety ways, including working in the Pentagon where he, along with his other tasks, wrote the letters to families of fallen service women and men. He was a successful businessman, running and starting major businesses. He was husband and father to his wife Dee, and his children Eric, Lisa, and Laura. He was a person of deep faith He was a wealthy man. Two decades ago he was one of the five top philanthropists in the United States. Still, Bill thought of himself primarily as a musician and a composer.

Bill’s generosity was focused, he gave a good deal of money to very few places. His wife Dee was a Special Education teacher having studied at Eastern Michigan. So Bill and Dee established Brehm Scholarships for those studying special education. Dee also had Type 1 Diabetes. So Bill established the Brehm Center for Type 1 Diabetes Research at the University of Michigan, Bill’s alma mater. Bill also created scholarships for his high school’s graduates in Dearborn to attend the University of Michigan. Most of these students are Muslim, as is the population of Dearborn now. Bill also composed many pieces of music and underwrote and published the work of many others. Bill was as much a visionary as he was generous.

Spiritual Topography

I have lived in many different places in North America, each one with its distinctive land and water formations and scenery. I have also, over six and a half decades, traveled in cars, vans, buses, and trains across Canada and the United States viewing much of that landscape as it passed by. You might think there would be very few surprises when you return to a familiar place. But that is not my experience. I often experience the distinctive topography of a place after having been away for a time with new eyes. Such was the case when I looked at the western horizon out the window of a northbound bus from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to Rockford, Illinois. I was stunned by just how flat it was. I was seeing, as if for the first time, how far into the distance one could see without obstruction. And I have traveled this highway literally hundreds of times in my life and know well how flat it is. Very familiar, yet still surprising.

In my prayers I reflected on this in light of the various spiritual landscapes we in our church are currently traversing from smooth, flat, and productive, to rocky, rough, and exhausting. Some of us are in the midst of mountaintop experiences like success, birth, promotion, or accomplishment. Others of us are experiencing the rugged terrain of illness, unstable employment, lack of confidence, strained relationships, or disappointment with one’s place in life. Some are even in deserts, where life seems empty and barren and God seems distant if not absent, while others are enduring life’s storms and floods, wondering if or when relief will come, and what the damage will be when it is over.

A NOTE FROM PASTOR LAUREN

Praying Together

Ever since I preached on the Lord’s Prayer a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking more about prayer–not that I ignored it beforehand, but I’ve been thinking more intently about it: how we pray, when we pray, why we pray. If you receive the Children & Youth Newsletter, as well, you’ll get a few more words from me on prayer soon (even if you’re not a parent, you can sign up for that one, too, if you’d like!). But for now, I just wanted to share a few thoughts about the opportunities we have to pray as a community at First Cov. 

We, of course, incorporate prayer into multiple parts of our worship service–there’s no shortage of prayer on Sundays. And while all of those prayers are important and meaningful, I’ve been thinking about the ways we pray together outside of the worship service. I’ve thought about the gift of our Prayer Partner ministry; I’ve thought about the Zoom prayer gatherings Pastor Steve Elde used to lead during the pandemic; and I’ve thought about a story Darel Grothaus recently shared with me. 

Seasons

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven.

~ Ecclesiastes 3:1

Everywhere I have lived has seasons. I assume the same is for you. However, the same four seasons look very differently depending where you are in the world. Growing up in “God’s Country” we had a delightful springs, summers, and falls. But in winter you paid your dues. When Buffalo, New York experienced the “Blizzard of 77,” Bradford, Pennsylvania had it worse, as we often did. But if you like cold, snow, and “snow day vacations,” as I did and do, then it was great all year around. Yet my winters in southern California were more like a rainy stretch of autumn back in the Allegheny Mountains than what I thought of as winter. June and July in SoCal are often very temperate, but August and September tended to be when the heat waves came, often breaking 100° F. Seasons express themselves differently in different parts of the world.