August is upon us. It used to be the last month of summer, back when school began after Labor Day. But students are already heading off to college and K-12 faculty and staff will soon be heading back to their offices and classrooms. August is a transitional month. The weather outside tells you its summer, while your calendar and its “to do lists” tells you otherwise. August is a month to look back, look forward, and take inventory. And so, I will.

I am not a fan of change. So it is with no amount of reluctance that I write these reflections about a change in our church.

Nat Bartels was hired almost exactly three years ago, July of 2019, “as a permanent, part-time employee” whose ministry title was “Organist/Accompanist”. This past Sunday was her last Sunday as a member of our Church Staff, though she will be “filling in” at least one more Sunday in August. By the time I met Nat in 2020, she was more than just a musician. She was functioning as our church’s music director and played a vital role in creating congregational song opportunities and special music for our prerecorded worship services.

There are a lot of songs about home. In the 60s and 70s many songs were written by people touring the world at a young age and missing home. (Trivia: The world renown band Coldplay cut short its first US tour in 2001 because they were homesick.) From James Taylor’s “Isn’t it Nice to be Home Again” to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” songs have identified “home” as a place that is an extension of yourself, and when you are absent from it, you are less than yourself. The song that has always defined home for me, was the Bacharach and David song, “A House is not a Home.” Home is where you find those you love. And when they are not there, a home becomes simply a house. Home is about relationships and identity.

I wanted to continue last week’s summer musings this week. As I mentioned last year, Summer is a season of vacating; leaving, emptying yourself of responsibilities for a short while, and hopefully returning with renewed energy and focus. And so it will be for Susan and me.

Susan was planning on going to visit her family in Rockford last week. My plans were to leave this week for Pittsburgh where I would meet up with three friends to go canoeing and camping on the Allegheny River.

Summer. It is a magical, mythical season. It is a time for play, think of Roger Kahn’s classic baseball book Boys of Summer, or your favorite amusement park. Summer’s a time for romance, think of your favorite songs about falling in love in the summer, or your favorite summer romance films. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream covers all the bases: love, supernatural, and summer coalescing into one of Bard’s most beloved plays. Summer for we moderns is time away and time off—summer vacation. We created a break from year around schooling so children could help on their family’s farm. When then-President Nixon suggested this need no longer existed and proposed eliminating summer vacation for students, the pushback was firm and decisive. Too much of our culture (and economy) assumed a magical oasis in the warmest, brightest time of the year. 

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.