Postcard from your Pastor

After two full days in England with our daughter Kelsey, a University College London student, Susan and I visited Cambridge, had a “punting” tour of the University colleges, saw a first edition (1611) King James Bible at Great St. Mary’s Church, saw St. Edward’s church where Robert Barnes preached the first Reformation sermon in England on Christmas Eve 1526, saw the site of the Wesley’s early preaching in London, prayed at choral Evensong services at King’s College Chapel (Cambridge) and St. Paul’s Cathedral (London), had fika in London at Fabrique (a great Swedish bakery in NYC, London, and Stockholm), and made some wonderful musical discoveries at Sister Ray’s Records.

Winners, Losers, and the Image and Likeness of God

When our children were young, after we moved from South Bend, Indiana to Chicago, autumn would bring our thoughts back to Notre Dame and football. We were fairly avid Irish fans. If Notre Dame suffered a loss (unfortunately often back then) I would tell our children, “We don’t need to go to church tomorrow. Notre Dame lost; there must be no God.”

Then Sunday morning would come and I would wake them up and say, “The sun is up and it’s a new day, God is obviously alive and well. Time to get ready for church.” Of course, this was a way to put such events and their outcomes in eternal perspective. Truth be told, it was as much for myself as for them.

Hope for our New Year

I write this near the end of my time at a conference I have attended almost every year for three decades. It is a gathering of scholars, artists, pastors, hymn-writers, architects, and church leaders. Most come from North America, though some are here from places around the globe: various places in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia, to name a few. What we all have in common is a love for, and commitment to, the faith life and worship of our Christian and Jewish communities.

New Year’s Resolutions

Some people have a practice of making goals for the new year, and then resolve to accomplish them. The people who study such things have determined that most people lose momentum to their resolve by mid-February and very few see their plan through to the end of the year.

On December 16 our Council and Staff gathered for a retreat to assess where we are as a church and what we might accomplish between now and the semi-annual meeting in June, when some of our council members will conclude their final term. These are not quite “new year’s resolutions” but instead an attempt to set targets for our work in the first half of the coming year. These are three we chose to focus upon.

The constant in the midst of the mayhem

Over the centuries and through the years, the celebration of Christmas, inside and outside of Christian churches, has changed—and continues to change. Over the centuries and through the years, Christmas has been celebrated in seasons of war and peace, feast and famine, plague and health, hope and hopelessness. But through it all the message of God’s love and salvation remains the same.

Advice on Repeat

This past year’s Julfest was my third. The first was a rather abbreviated event from the norm, and was held shortly after worship, as I recall. Last year and this year we had what I understand to be a more typical Julfests by First Covenant standards. They are becoming more familiar to me now. And, it seems, I am becoming more familiar to some of our “regulars” who are not members. I say this because people were very generous in their offers of suggestions and advice about both Julfest and being a church in the current post-Christian context we find ourselves in.

From Lent to Advent: Disaster to Dedication

Today, December 8th, is the first full day of Hannukah. It is a Jewish festival of lights that has become increasingly popular in the Western world, responding to the rise of Christmas in the 20th century as a Christian-turned-cultural celebration. The origins of Hannukah are found in the Greek conquest of the Holy Land by Alexander the Great, and the subsequent rulers over the Jews who were much less gracious than Alexander himself. Specifically, Antiochus Epiphanes' (175-164 BCE) rule over the Jews was particularly harsh. He robbed the Temple in Jerusalem and desecrated it. “Ruthless” is a word that befits him.

Radio, Friends’ Voices, and Advent—Waiting and Arriving

I am proudly old school. I was a slow adopter to cassette tapes, and even slower to CDs and MP3s. While some rediscovered vinyl records, I never stopped listening to vinyl. I am even more committed to radio. Though I confess that at times I listen to the radio online, I still prefer over the air. This week my steadfast practice of listening to the radio was rewarded. I was surprised to hear two friends’ voices on the airwaves this past week.

Giving Thanks

It is a well told tale, but one worth retelling, especially in these days. The time and place is seventeenth century Germany. The specific context is the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). The person is Martin Rinkart, a Lutheran pastor, in the city of Ellensburg. Ellensburg was a walled city that provided refuge for those fleeing the violence and pain of that war. While it provided safety from war, it created a refugee crisis, with too little food and shelter for those inside the walls of Ellensburg. Though Rinkart and his family had little, they shared what they had with many people.

The Advent Of Practice

For about three decades now, those studying the Christian faith, and religions in general, have recovered a concept that had faded away in many religious communities. This is the concept of the practices of faith. It seems that since the invention of the printing press, and all the ways of creating and distributing texts since its invention, most spiritual formation has been fairly bookish. Before that, spiritual practices for most people were a balance of oral communication and practices that put that teaching—at the risk of saying the obvious—“into practice.” Studies in education and formation in general, and faith formation in particular, have demonstrated that the most effective way to foster one’s faith life is a regular rhythm of faith practices.

Conversations

I have been hearing about a number of conversations occurring in recent days in the Seattle area. An 11-year-old Jewish girl asked her mother why so many people hate her because she’s Jewish. Area colleges and universities have Jewish and Muslim students who are asking why their fellow students are considering them to blame for, or even supportive of, the violence in the Middle East. Both Jews and Muslims are being accused as being “unfaithful” for asking for a ceasefire and a return of the hostages. The Executive Director of Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity has tried to frame the conversation about the current war in Gaza about people and not politics, saying, “You can be pro-Israel, and you can be pro-Palestinian, and you can be against (violence) all at the same time.”

The Day of the Dead, All Saints Day, and Daylight Savings

This week’s reflection begins with a Public Service Announcement: Daylight Savings Time ends on Saturday. Please remember that the hour you lost on April 2nd is given back to you this weekend. If you don’t set your clock back, you may well get to church an hour early. Please feel free to put the coffee on while you wait.

Thresholds

When architects design an interior space, they pay attention to boundaries. Boundaries are most often defined by walls as they separate indoors from outdoors, and one room from another. This also allows for spaces to be distinct from one another. Like a hall from a bedroom, or a living room from a dining room. Of course, you need to have some way to get through the wall to get to what lies behind. These are often doorways, cut out from the wall to allow for passage. However, some architects design spaces to create less distinction, creating more flow and less separation between rooms. In older homes, some people will remove some or all of a wall to create the sense of unity between a family room and a kitchen, for example. In either type of space, you may walk from the kitchen to the living room, but the experiences are different with one having a more distinct crossing point, or threshold, the other being more gradual, being less clear when you leave one and enter the other.

Hospitality

I think of our church as being a very hospitable community. The fact that people have literally walked in off the street and found this church to be their faith community speaks to that. Thank you all for being generous with your welcome.

That being said, there are a number of people who come into our worship services that leave without being greeted or welcomed in any way. Sitting where I sit when the postlude begins, I have seen a good number of people leave before I have gone down the aisle. Some of them have returned, though many of them have not. I wonder how many may have returned if they had been welcomed before they left? We may never know.

Love and Hate

I don’t remember the first time I ever heard the term “hate crime.” I know I didn’t hear it as child. My children, however, have grown up with the term. Certainly, what we call hate crimes existed when I was younger, we just didn’t call them that. But I was also somewhat blind to them. As I grew up, I became more aware of how much bias, prejudice, and hate there was in the world. These attitudes often vilify and dehumanize other people, sometimes blaming them for their problems. It was my volunteering in a Black church in the housing projects of Pittsburgh that I felt called to ministry. It was there that I saw a sharp contrast between the lives our sisters and brothers in Christ in their everyday lives and their lives within the church. In a world that told them they were “worth less” than others, limiting their human potential, the church gave them hope and love. I felt called to be an agent of God’s love and hope in the world

“Discovery” and Leif Erikson

October 9, since 1935, has been a holiday. The holiday’s name is Leif Erikson Day. It is the day that commemorates the arrival of the first “European” on North American soil. The idea that Leif Erikson was the first European to “discover” America was promoted by Scandinavians in Canada and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in 1935 President F. D. Roosevelt signed it into law. Each year the sitting U.S. president declares the holiday once again.

Of course, this year, October 9 is also Columbus Day. Since 1792 in New York, Columbus Day has been celebrated on October 12. In 1934 Congress made it a national holiday, and in 1971 it became a federal holiday, and it moved to the second Monday in October. This year the second Monday is October 9.

Praying and Living the Lord's Prayer

Each Sunday, after we invite the Holy Spirit to consecrate our offering of worship to make it worthy of our God, we pray the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer has been used in Christian worship for as long as we have records. A document contemporary with the New Testament gives us the earliest version of the Lord’s Prayer outside of the gospels. It also required the faithful to pray the “Our Father” three times a day. It is uncertain if this was part of daily corporate prayer or personal prayer, or both.

For as long as the Lord’s Prayer has been part of Christian practice, there are some questions that are still not settled, such as, “Where in worship should it be prayed?” Many Christians pray it as part of the prayers at Christ’s Table. Others place it with the intercessions or prayers of the people. Others, like us, use it early in our worship service as a model for our prayers and a reminder that God both invites and instructs us to pray.

Following Luther’s Advice

Martin Luther is known for many things, including being credited (or blamed) for the separation of the “protesting churches” (now known as Protestant churches) from the Roman Church. However, most people do not think him as first being a pastor. Even fewer know that prayer was one of the most important themes in his pastoral writings and preaching. In this season of our church’s life, one of Luther’s thoughts on prayer seems most appropriate for us to heed. Luther said simply but profoundly, “I have so much to do today that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.

Luther was quick to point out that prayer was not a “work,” or something done to win God’s favor. Instead, prayer was our response to God’s command for us to pray, and insistence that God would guide our prayers, even giving us words to pray. For Luther, prayer helped conform us to God.

Leave-taking from IPS to Pastor Steve

I was hired for my first tenure track academic position by Loyola University Chicago for their Institute of Pastoral Studies. IPS was started in the early 1960s during the Second Vatican Council by Loyola’s School of Education, not its Theology Department. It was established to provide education for clergy and women and men religious for the church that was being imagined at Vatican II before its conclusion. By the time I arrived on the faculty over three decades later, it was one of the premier ministry schools in the United States, drawing students from all over the world, as well as a number of different denominations and traditions. What made it truly unique is that every class was capped at 12 students. If 13 people enrolled, they would split it into two classes. It was the most intimate formal learning context I have ever been a part of. And this intimacy created an intense sense of community because of it.

Labor Day and Calendars

This past Monday was Labor Day. Although summer technically ends about midnight, September 22nd this year, most people think of Labor Day as the last day of summer. For those in the Seattle Public Schools, Labor Day marks the end of summer vacation, but for First Covenant Church, Labor Day marks the beginning of the new year. That is, our new fiscal year, which to be specific, begins September 1st each year.