I tend to be an optimist, my attitude is often reflected by the Carter Family’s song “Keep on the Sunny Side.” But sometimes life's clouds eclipse my sunny disposition and find myself singing Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood's song “I’ve Been Down So Long (It Looks Like Up to Me).” The news of this past weekend has led me to be humming Nancy and Lee a bit more these days.

I returned home from our delightful “Get to Know First Covenant” gathering Sunday afternoon, only to learn of a church shooting in Southern California.

The events of the past weeks, when put in the context of the past two years, may leave you disillusioned, despairing, or at least distracted. So let’s deal with the distracted first.

Some opportunities are coming up at our church that I wouldn’t want you to overlook. The first two have to do with our support of missions. On Saturday, May 21, many of us will be walking at Green Lake and Alki to raise money to make clean water more accessible for those people in the world who walk 6 kilometers or more to get their water. That’s about 3 ½ miles. There is information below about this event. Please join us as you are able, or donate to someone who is walking. This is an easy way to significantly impact an important problem in our world.

As a child I sang of God holding “the whole world in his hands.” At the time, the image I had in my head was one of a smooth, maybe even bouncy ball. Something pleasant—maybe even fun—to hold. As I have gotten older, I have come to think of that world as being a bit heavier and much more prickly. Not something one would enjoy holding, especially for a long time.

If one were to look at the conflicts in the world…

Don’t mix metaphors. It is standard advice given in composition classes. If your writing is flowing well, it is like driving down a smooth road, but adding a mixed metaphor can take the wind out of your sails.

You get the picture.

I am not sure the authors of the New Testament were well versed in this wisdom, however. The texts we read in the Easter season are a bit divergent. Jesus is the good shepherd, the sacrificial lamb, the lamb who is a groom, and the lamb who is worthy of worship. A variety of mixed metaphors, if you ask me.

How good it was to say these words this past Easter Sunday. Our journey to Easter together has been a challenging one. The invasion of Ukraine almost exactly coincided with the beginning of Lent. And each Sunday in Lent we were taken deeper into the reality of human sin by the news of the week—Ukraine and elsewhere, local and global—even as the scriptures took us deeply into the gracious love of our God. We sustained each other with the gifts of our reflections on a variety of human emotions and divine responses through our reflections on the psalms during this season. And Holy Week took us from “Hosanna,” through betrayal and “Crucify him!,” to “Alleluia.” There is a visual depiction of this journey in my office windows that can be viewed in the hall outside my office. It has been a full season to be sure.

The early protestant movements, beginning with Martin Luther, were all described as “evangelical.” This label identified that what was distinctive about this movement was the centrality of the Bible; the emphasis on testing practice and belief by the biblical witness. And of course, this was possible because of the printing press, which had, for the first time in history, made Bibles available to ordinary people.

One of the marks of Luther was his insistence on the whole of scripture being our guide, not just selective parts. He famously said one cannot have a theology of glory, without a theology of the Cross. Luther realized

Holy Week. It is a familiar, but unusual, pairing of words. What makes one week more holy than another, after all? The Hebrew scriptures are consistent insisting that some times are more holy than others. They proclaimed that the Sabbath, from sunset Friday until sunset Saturday, was a holy space in time. God’s peace, or Shalom, was present on that day in ways that God’s peace was not present on other days. Therefore, people were to live differently that day, to keep the day holy. Christians, who were all initially Jewish, preserved this understanding of sacred time, but shifted it from the Sabbath to the day after the Sabbath, celebrating a holy day of resurrection each Lord’s Day (or Sunday).

What a great celebration we had this past Sunday! We celebrated the abundant and unmerited mercy of our God in worship and followed that with the celebration of our Prayer Partner ministry. At the same time, we celebrated the generous efforts of our Nurture Faith team and all they have done for our church in the season of our being physically dispersed but virtually connected. In the midst of those celebrations came the joy that many of us felt of being together as a church, generations together, catching up on time that has passed—even as parents caught up to their young children as they toddled away, maybe something they could not do the last time they were seen. It all gave us a glimpse of a new normal on the horizon that felt like home again.

For the first time in a long time, I am experiencing the early days of Spring without praying for rain because of an ongoing drought. Though some people may tire of Cascadia’s dark and drizzly days, I do not take them for granted. So many in our country and around the world are struggling to find adequate water, while we grumble about having too much of it. Which only serves to remind us that there are two sides to a coin.

This past Sunday was a double-header of sorts. When I was young and went to see baseball double headers, we called them “bargain bills.” I loved spending the day at two (count ‘em 2!) baseball games for the price of one. It made it worth the hours long trip to Cleveland or Pittsburgh. I also remember many memorable double features at the movie theatre in my hometown. When I later worked at the movie theatre in high school, double features were a lot less fun.

It is said that it is a curse to be living in “interesting times.” Curse or not, these interesting days we are living in certainly have a strong gravitational pull on our attention. It is hard not to find ourselves following one story after another about the invasion of Ukraine, the economic instability and food insecurity of so many in our world—including our nation, the current state of the virus around the world, and the health of democracy here and abroad. And we haven’t even gotten to sports yet!

A blessed Ash Wednesday to you all.

In this season of both Lent and war, I am reminded of the words of Christian educator and nun, Jane Marie Murry, who described the Christian life as a battle.

“What the Christian warfare means is giving up sin and building up ways of virtue in place of sin. This is not done without effort and a real struggle. Actually, for each person, it means mobilizing their energies and facing the enemy right on the front lines and battling there.

We all operate according to a calendar. We organize our days, weeks, and years in some way to keep track of them and give them meaning and importance. But we seldom have just one calendar. For example, “the” calendar tells us it is Wednesday, February 23 today, almost the end of the shortest month. The sports calendar tells us that football season is over, soccer seasons will soon begin again, and March Madness is just around the corner. (The sports calendar, however, is not as helpful this year in telling us when Spring Training will start!) The Church calendar tells us it is almost Lent.

The seasons are beginning to change. More daylight and more moderate temperatures together indicate the transition from winter to spring. As a church, we find ourselves in the process of transitions as well. We are likewise transitioning from winter to spring, and giving winter its final due for the year by celebrating our “In the Bleak Midwinter” games on Saturday evening, February 26th at 7 pm. This will be an online gathering and details for this “can’t miss/don’t miss” event are below. I look forward to seeing you there.

Dear Friends,

I look forward to seeing you—at least some of you—in all three of your glorious dimensions this Sunday in worship. Our opening plans are listed below in this FYI and will be posted on our website. Being our first day back, we will proceed with caution, but hope to loosen our preventative measures as the numbers continue to decline. We hope to be back to our previous COVID practices soon. And pray that we might return to pre-COVID practices soon thereafter. Thank you all for your patience and understanding.

Dear Friends,

Growing up in northwestern Pennsylvania, one gets a distorted view of time and climate. First, growing up in the snow belt south and east of Lake Erie (think: Buffalo), you come to expect a typical winter to include sub-zero temperatures and measuring snow falls by the foot. You also trust that the people forecasting the weather know more about the future than you do so you can plan. But they do not know as much about it as a groundhog in Punxsutauney, about 2 hours due south of my childhood home. Of course, many years and a movie later, Punxsutawney Phil’s fearless prognostications are an international event. So, a happy Groundhog Day to you all. I hope to have our Groundhog Day cards unpacked by next year’s holiday. But for now enjoy, what Phil predicts will be six more weeks of winter.

This Sunday we hold our church’s Annual Business Meeting. For me, this event brings to mind words like polis, polity, and even politics; because our church’s business is about being the people of God. And that takes all of us. Let me explain. Polis is a term that is often translated as “city” but actually referred to the admirative and religious center of a city, and later referred to the people under the authority of the polis. Polity is a term that came much later based on polis, referring to an organization creating the rules of life together. We often refer to a church’s polity as the way it organizes itself or its policies. Politics, before it was a negative term, referred to the way people related to each other within the policies of a community. In the end, it is all about people. People who care for one another and care for their common task.

Dear Friends,

It is already past the midpoint of January; we are well into the year 2021 2022. (It takes me a while to get used to writing or typing the new year!) Yet much of what has defined the past two years seems to be with us at the start of this new one. And of course, that has to do with the ongoing presence of the coronavirus in our world, found both near and far.

Dear Friends,

It is already past the midpoint of January; we are well into the year 2021 2022. (It takes me a while to get used to writing or typing the new year!) Yet much of what has defined the past two years seems to be with us at the start of this new one. And of course, that has to do with the ongoing presence of the coronavirus in our world, found both near and far.