Dear Friends,

I have returned from the Covenant’s Annual Meeting in Kansas City with some insights and observations. Here are a few of them. To begin with, I was struck by how much my colleagues have aged, how many of them had children who I met, and how many of my classmates were retiring. Then I realized it was decades, not years, since I had last been among many of these colleagues of mine. Over those decades, however, both the denomination and I have changed. The gathering at both the Ministerium and the Annual Meeting was very intergenerational, multiracial, with much larger percentage of women in leadership and in attendance. There were also many more people who are not “cradle Covenanters” which has led to a more diverse denomination than before.

Leaving on a jet plane. Sounded so romantic when John Denver wrote it and Peter. Paul, and Mary sang it. Not so much being on a full flight in an on-going pandemic. But off I go to my first Covenant Annual meeting in two decades, and my first time as a delegate ever. I have been blissfully ignorant of much of the goings on in the Covenant the past 16 years. And that level of disconnection has been diminishing over the past two years. I am looking forward to learning first-hand about the what the denominational home since my birth has become and is becoming.

And I look forward to sharing that knowledge with you upon my return.

But for now I have the privilege of introducing you to the five people who will be received into membership in our church this Sunday.

When I was young I loved math and science. I enjoyed figuring out math and algebra problems and applying my math skills to science, especially physics problems. I enjoyed math and physics enough to pursue an electrical engineering degree in college. By the time I had begun my second year in my engineering program, what I thought was a nudge to reconsider my vocation turned into a call to ministry, and a shift away from numbers, equations, and experiments to much less concrete and calculable subjects. I still love math and enjoy it when I have opportunities to return to it.

This past Sunday was filled with numbers, though nothing that had to do with asymptotes, velocity, variables, or energy. Though truth be told, there was some energy—and enthusiasm—in our building on Sunday, mostly provided by you.

What is old often becomes new again. Sometimes it is a welcome return, other times, not so much. Plagues are old and are now with us again. Not such a good thing, most would say. On the other hand, there are approaches to religious education and faith formation that fell by the wayside after the printing press was invented, that have returned with renewed vigor in the past half-century.

The Reformation is the direct result of the printing press. What I grew up being told was a “biblical Christian faith” could not exist until people had Bibles and were able to read them. The printing press changed education both inside and outside of churches.

Marking time and making time. We are in that period the year when we begin to negotiate a change in seasons and changes in life patterns. Days are getting noticeably longer, meaning the longest day of the year, the official first day of summer will soon be here. Of course, that will also initiate the slow shrinkage in our hours of daylight. We remedy this by acting like summer arrives Memorial Day week-end, which is already behind us. Regardless, the long, dark, and somewhat reclusive days of winter have receded and now we are anticipating making up for it with an active and enjoyable summer. 

We are about to enter into a “trifecta of worship” in our next three Sundays. This Sunday we will celebrate the Ascension of our Lord. We are reminded in the Nicene Creed that Jesus “suffered death and was buried, rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” Jesus dying and rising is completed by his ascending, all one act of God’s redemption. So in this last Sunday of Easter we celebrate the final act of our Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection—his ascension.

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.