December 2, 2022

Conditions, Traditions, and Transitions: 

Stream of conscience ramblings in the first week of Advent

Last Wednesday some of you contributed to a worship service that I would describe as being heartfelt and inspiring gratitude. You offered your voices to songs, prayers and personal reflections. Those who attended in person had the opportunity after the service to practice eating pumpkin pie before you ate the “official” pie the next day. I cannot speak to what those who attended virtually did. If you did not attend this service in any mode, it is not too late. I encourage you to view the recording of the service. I believe you will consider it an hour well spent.

Thanksgiving has many memories for me, but this year I was reminded of Thanksgiving in 2019. That year a colleague of mine at Fuller and her husband joined us for dinner, along an assortment of friends, including the husband of my cousin from Stockholm. He was working for the Covenant Church in Sweden, while working on a PhD in Theology. The denomination sent him to the American Academy of Religion meeting, which is always the weekend before Thanksgiving, in San Diego that year. He stayed with us and traveled with Susan and me to San Diego for the meeting. He intentionally extended his stay with us to the Friday after Thanksgiving, because he wanted to have “the traditional Thanksgiving dinner.” Though the meal on the table may have been traditional, the people around the table were international, representing India, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Sweden, and the U.S. I would like to think that such a gathering will become more traditional for our country. At least this is my hope and prayer. In this case both the meal and the gathering was a success.

How different that experience was from the experience my mother had about a half-century earlier. My mother, who was part Swedish, married the son of Swedish immigrants. It was early in the Fall when she was informed that some of her husband’s relatives from Sweden would soon be coming to visit. So Mom pulled out her mother-in-law’s recipes from the Motherland, and began to prepare what she hoped would be a familiar and welcoming meal. How surprised she was to be told, “We don’t eat like this anymore. This is peasant’s food.” Our guests were hoping for American beef and got fish with boiled potatoes with white sauce.

Meals and traditions, as I learned, are always in transition. I never put jalapeños in corn bread stuffing before I lived in in California—though I stole the idea from a favorite Chicago restaurant—but now you can find it on our table at Thanksgiving. Not so much the mincemeat pie. And Swedes do not eat the same way they did in the days of a famine that literally drove half of the Swedish population to North America. Their celebration of Christmas, their level of church attendance, and the make-up of their population have all changed—sometimes drastically—from what it was when Swedes came to our land of opportunity in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries.

First Covenant Church will once again offer its Julfest celebration as a way of honoring those Swedish women and men who found a new home on the shores of Puget Sound, and the traditions they brought with them. It will harken back to the origins of our church, and for some of us, our family’s origins. A central point in the festival will be the celebration of Saint Lucy, who was from Sicily, and of course never got close to Sweden; though the tradition honoring her did. Likewise, this service is a reminder that we live in one of the greatest periods of human migration in history. People, many of them our sisters and brothers in Christ, are leaving their homeland for what they hope will be a new land of opportunity. Even as we celebrate our past, may we pray fervently and empathetically for those who are in desperate need of a land of freedom and possibility, and a place to serve our God without fear.

But Christians are not the only religious group on the move in search of a welcome. Next week Barbara and Steve Swanson will be visiting our church. Steve, a former pastor at First Covenant, and Barbara are currently missionaries we support in Sweden. Their ministry is to Muslim refugees in Sweden. They will be participating in our Julfest on Sunday, as well as telling us about their ministries at a dinner at our church on Tuesday, December 6. I strongly encourage you to participate in both, as together they bring the past and future of our church together. Please contact Arlie or Rita Swanson to make reservations for our salmon dinner on Tuesday, and arrange for what you might contribute to our table.

Now we have come full circle, offering God thanks. We offer thanks for a rich past and robust history; thanks for a current ministry which embraces a diversity of people, generations, and opportunities to serve; and thanks for a future filled with promise and hope. These thanks and hopes will all intersect at our celebration at the Lord’s Table in this Sunday’s service. So we offer thanks to those women and men who came before us, and thanks to you who continue to live into their legacy, yet mostly we offer thanks to a generous and loving God, who embraces all people and all traditions and leads us into an unknown future of potential and promise.

~ Pastor Todd