There in God’s garden stands the Tree of Wisdom, whose leaves hold forth the healing of the nations:

Tree of all knowledge, Tree of all compassion, Tree of all beauty.

Thorns not its own are tangled in its foliage; our greed has starved it, our despite has choked it.

Yet, look! It lives!  Its grief has not destroyed it nor fire consumed it.

See how its branches reach to us in welcome; hear what the Voice says, “Come to me, ye weary!

Give me your sickness, give me all your sorrow, I will give blessing.”

– There in God’s Garden, #342 in Evangelical Lutheran Worship

Words by Pécselyi Király Imre (Hungary, c. 1590—c. 1641)

Beloved of God,

Toward the end of the film masterpiece, Return of the King, the last of three films based on The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, as the dark minions of Mordor mass for battle and the end of all that is good seems inevitable, the story takes us to the White City of Gondor—Minas Tirith.  Minas Tirith represents the nations’ last, best hope, but the steward of its throne has tipped the scale toward madness, and now the fate of the whole inhabited world lies on a knife’s edge.  At the pinnacle of the alabaster city’s mountain bulkhead, in the plaza high above the plain where the decisive battle will be joined, stands the White Tree of Gondor.  It is a symbol of the nation’s long kingly heritage, its dignity, wisdom, endurance and fruitfulness.  But this once great tree has lost all its leaves, and the bare limbs that remain seem to portend that the noble tree, like the nation itself, is destined for oblivion.  But as the siege of Gondor begins and casualties mount, we watch as, inexplicably, a single white blossom on the tree—unheralded and unnoticed—opens; a sign that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, all is not lost, and a future with hope is still a possibility. It’s a stirring moment but one that is easily missed.

This month the Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) of the United Nations issued a summary about the state of species on our planet home that was hard to miss.  It was shocking.  Elements of the natural world—both plants and animals—are declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history.  As many as one million species are under threat.  In addition, the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely.  “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever,” says IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson.  “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”[1]  What are we to do with this information?

From earliest days, Easter has been celebrated as the “8th day of creation” because in raising Christ from death God has ushered in a whole new world.  Baptismal fonts through the ages have often taken on octagonal shapes because of this very recognition. Questions that God’s people keep alive during this Easter season include:

• How do we as a community which gathers around the Risen Christ live the resurrection life?
• How can we live in such a way that our choices and commitments mirror the risen life to which our Lord calls us?
• How can new patterns of living support the renewal that his rising presages?

These questions pertain to the choices we make each day and are firmly rooted in our care for the neighbor—which includes the many species with whom we share planet Earth and on which our own survival as a species depends.

One of my new(er) favorite hymns is the one quoted above, by Hungarian hymnwriter Pécselyi Király Imre. Imre, a Lutheran pastor, lived during the Reformation era, a time of tumultuous change when every strata of society was undergoing sea change. Originally fashioned as a meditation on Jesus’ seven last words from the cross with fifteen stanzas,   contemporary hymnwriter Erik Routley provides a paraphrase of six of those stanzas in the form we have in our hymnal. Using the great image of the Tree as both Cross and Christ, the hymn lifts up the healing and saving role of the crucified and risen One while at the same time demarking the “thorns” that threaten the Tree. What I find particularly moving about this hymn is how it speaks truthfully about the threats we face without allowing those threats to undercut the testimony of hope. Like that single bloom on the White Tree of Gondor, this hymn testifies to hope at a time when hopelessness threatens to overwhelm.

The IPBES report from a group of global scientists includes a call to action. It tells us it’s not too late to make a difference, but only if we start now at every level from local to global. “Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably – this is also key to meeting most other global goals. By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” The report omits the term “spiritual” from the list of factors, but for us who follow in Jesus’ footsteps it is essential, and in fact grounds, informs, and abets all the others. As the stories from the book of Acts make clear throughout this Easter season, Christians are people primed for transformative change! The incarnation and the resurrection of Christ affirm the sacredness of this Earthly realm, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on God’s fledgling people exemplifies God’s commitment in Christ to “make all things new.” For followers of Christ, despair is never an option; hope gives shape to every dream and endeavor we set our hearts to. With crisis in the natural world looming, we have the opportunity and obligation to get out in front and lead by example.

[1] You can find the summary here: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

“Thus says the LORD: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you perceive it?”

– Isaiah 43:18-19

Beloved of God,

We know them—people dominated by narratives from their past; narratives that hold them captive; narratives from which they are unable to extract themselves.  There may be good reasons for this.  And yet, staying stuck in old patterns exacts a price on the present, and can prevent us from seeing the promise and the possibility of an alternative future.  We know them, and at times we are them.

While I was in Minnesota recently, visiting my mother Shirley in her final days, I was simultaneously going through personal items at my parents’ home as we prepared to put the house on the market.  The first night there, I found a neat pile of items from the past that had been collected and set aside.  A few of them delighted me—the “lost” penny collection from my childhood—including two WW2 vintage aluminum pennies—which I was convinced my younger brothers had raided to buy candy at the corner store.  And the wonderful handwritten notes (in fine cursive script!) I’d received from Montana classmates after moving to Minnesota in the midst of my 4th grade year.  Those I brought home.

There were other items that didn’t make the return trip to Seattle.  Most of these consisted of letters I had written to my parents through the years, some of them during times of significant trial.  As I began reviewing them I could feel the weight of those trying times begin to bear down on me once more.  After a quick phone call to a confidant, they found their way into the recycle bin.  The relief was palpable.  I would not allow bygone events to wriggle their way into my present or my future.

The prophet Isaiah says as much to God’s people as they prepare to leave the land of their exile and head home:

“That old material that once dominated your lives?—leave it behind. I’ve got something better in store for you—in fact it’s unfolding right now, and if you pay attention you can see it!” 

This is God’s message to us all in the death and resurrection of Christ: those old narratives and conflicts, the old prisons, the personal and collective hells that have kept us captive have been breached once and for all.  God is doing a new thing, and it is marvelous in our eyes!  The future is OPEN!

Holy Week and Easter Blessings!

Pastor Erik

“Judging others makes us blind, but love gives us sight.

By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and

to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship

Beloved of God,

Their names run the gamut from the 16th century English poet John Donne to the two 18th century slaves-turned-abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth; from the 5th century’s Saint Patrick to the 20th century’s Saint Oscar Romero.  What do they have in common?  In each case, their commemoration date or feast day on the church calendar falls on a Sunday during Lent this year.  Add to these the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran pastor and resister during Hitler’s 3rd Reich, and we end up with a season peopled by followers of Christ who demonstrated uncommon courage through acts of love and discipleship in the face of fear and institutional injustice.  Look for their names, their faces, and their deeds to be woven through our worship life as the season of Lent unfolds.

Each of these extraordinary persons lived out their vocations in full understanding of their need for community; and each has something to teach us about the value of community in our 21st century world—a world which, though more socially “connected” than ever, is marked by estranged relationships and the inability to talk across “enemy” lines.  The life stories of these diverse witnesses inspire us to see our own with fresh eyes.

It was the poet and pastor Donne who penned the lines:

               “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…

any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.” [1]

This is the reality we seek to live each week when we gather as God’s beloved community around the Eucharistic meal.

Our family has felt the embrace of this beloved community in a profound way over the last month in the aftermath of Kai’s sledding accident.[2]  Church community, school community, neighborhood community, medical community—all of them, all of you—rallied to weave a dense layer of prayer and care around our family in the face of trauma.  We lift our hearts in gratitude to God for you—tangible emblems of God’s ever present, compassionate accompaniment.

There are many examples of ongoing trauma besetting our world.  By refusing to allow fear to control or silence them, these ordinary people named above became extraordinary witnesses, telling the truth, breaking down barriers, challenging the status quo, putting their own lives at risk while leading others to freedom.

Minutes before being assassinated while presiding at Holy Communion in San Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Romero told his congregation: “Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that…only apparently dies. If it were not to die, it would remain a solitary grain.  The harvest comes becomes of the grain that dies… We know that every effort to improve society above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.” 

If Bonhoeffer is right—that judging blinds us but love gives us sight—then perhaps this Lenten season can become an opportunity for practicing less judging and more loving.  The traditional disciplines of Lent—prayer, fasting, almsgiving—sets us up beautifully to do just that, and to follow our Lord on a pilgrim’s journey that will lead us from death to life.

With you on the Way,

Pastor Erik

[1] From MEDITATION XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

[2] By God’s mercy, Kai’s healing is progressing well.

“Oh, the house of denial has thick walls and very small windows

and whoever lives there, little by little, will turn to stone.”

– Mary Oliver

 “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”

– Robert Frost

Beloved of God,

One of the great motivations for us to move forward with our plans to “refresh” our sanctuary and narthex with new carpet, paint, lighting, furniture, and windows, is to make our building space and facilities match the bright, vibrant and welcoming nature of our community.  Phases 1 and 2 of this project call for us to focus on spaces within the building, but conversations will inevitably lead us to evaluate the outside of our building as well—the face we project to the neighborhood and community beyond our doors.

We’ve done quite a bit in recent years—via God’s Work-Our Hands projects, patio events, raingardens and cisterns, Tiny House build, ramps, little library, solar panels, HUB work—to give neighbors a view into the priorities of this congregation that gathers at 39th and Thistle.   When we replace the westside narthex windows (Phase 2) with ones which are more energy efficient and which allow us to visually connect with the world outside our building (and visa versa), we’ll be taking another step toward seeing our mission more clearly.  That mission to “venture beyond ourselves” (Vision Statement) calls us to always be looking for ways to connect with the people and world around us; ways to join in the work God is already doing there.

While we’ve been moving forward with our facility plan, the news cycle in the greater world has been dominated by conversation about the need—or not—for a wall along the U.S. Mexico border.  Poet Mary Oliver, who died last month, reminds us that walls not only separate people and things, they damage the souls of those who erect them. (See excerpt of her poem above.)  The next line of her poem reads: “In those years I did everything I could do and I did it in the dark— I mean without understanding.” Entrenched positions put blinders on us from which there is no escape.

During this Season of Light we are called to follow Christ beyond our personal or corporate entrenchments. To remind us how difficult this can be, as February begins we hear the story of Jesus’ sermon in this hometown of Nazareth. At first, the community seems to welcome his message – proclaiming liberty to captives and letting the oppressed go free sounds perfectly fine to them.  But the ensuing conversation devolves into an argument about insiders and outsiders and the next thing you know, the hometown crowd is ready to throw Jesus over the cliff!

St. Paul, who planted many congregations throughout the Mediterranean world and who struggled to help them grasp the implications of being grafted into Christ, spoke powerfully about the importance of reconciliation, which at its heart is about breaking down barriers so relationships can be restored. In Ephesians he writes: “For Christ is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups (Jew and Gentile) into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”  And in 2 Corinthians Paul testifies to the God “who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”

In his poem, Mending Wall, Robert Frost takes us with him as he and his neighbor go through their annual process of “setting the wall between us” which weather, man, and beast have breached. In the middle of this exercise, Frost wonders aloud why they do it.  “Good fences make good neighbors,” comes his neighbor’s reply.  And Frost challenges: “Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.  Before I built a wall I’d ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offence.  Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”  In the end, Frost concludes of his neighbor, “He moves in darkness as it seems to me, not of woods only and the shade of trees.”

A good deal of the opposition Jesus experienced in his ministry—including in his hometown—had to do with how he pushed the presumed boundaries of God’s circle of care outward, so that it encompassed those whom law and tradition had walled out.  When at his crucifixion the curtains of the Temple are torn in two from top to bottom—the last wall between God and humanity is breached.  But we human beings are good at building and maintaining walls and fences.  And so the work of erecting them in locations both new and old continues ad nauseam.

Yet, however much we find ourselves tilting toward the task of erecting or reinforcing barriers that would divide, Jesus shows us—and great poets remind us—not to mindlessly accept the convention of wall building, but to bend will and body instead to the task of their dismantling.

Peace,

Pastor Erik