Beloved of God,

The month of March finds us smack dab in the middle of the Lenten journey, and with early signs of spring emerging all around us after the warmest winter on record it’s hard to miss the connection to Lent as “springtime of the soul.” The hymn by Delores Dufner makes that connection explicit as it invites us to prepare the rich, dark soil of our hearts to receive the seed of God’s word this season; to become hospitable and welcome hosts for the “grain God bent to sow.”

From meetings with families preparing for their child’s baptism, to elementary retreats at Lutherwood; from our LEGACY celebration March 7th to the Palm Sunday’s choral cantata, No Greater Sacrifice; from weekly webinars on neighborhood outreach to the Spring Cleaning workday and Family Promise Fundraiser on March 20th, we’re all about rooting more deeply the “grain God bent to sow.”

One of my former professors died last month – Loren Halvorson, who taught at Luther Northwestern Seminary when I was a student. I found myself in his “church and society” course when I was a senior.  In that seminary world where heady theological concepts and conversations tended to predominate, Loren’s lectures and the projects he required from us opened up a whole new world grounded in that place where seeds meet soil.  Loren was all about Christian praxis—faith based action at the nexus of Word and world, and the “infinite loop” linking our worship life (ALTAR) with our vocational life in the world (STREET).  He brought the social-ethical conversation, i.e. how the church engages concretely in the world, into sharp focus for a generation of students, and his keen intellect was always imagining new ways that the church could incarnate the lively and powerful presence of the gospel in the world.

Loren and his wife Ruth founded ARC (a play on the biblical image forming an acronym standing for: Action – Reflection – Celebration) an intentional Christian Community north of the Twin Cities.  The cedar log structure they built there with the volunteer labor and ongoing investment of many hands, hearts, and pocketbooks, was an early retreat place for my family when I was a student; providing a welcome respite where spiritual reflection, personal story telling, spirited theological conversation, wholesome foods, and manual labor provided a welcome balance to those who sojourned there.  Thirty years later, some of the recipes I picked up from the ARC kitchen continue to make their way to our dinner table.

During the final months of Loren’s life, his wife Ruth wrote a blog on the Caring Bridge website that went out to a large audience of family members, friends, colleagues and former students.  It was moving for me to receive Ruth’s nightly journal entry, and to feel through those entries that I was sitting at bedside with a teacher who had spent a good deal of his life awakening others to God’s presence in the world and who now, in his final days, was teaching us how to die.  What a legacy! Ruth’s January 30th entry included these words:

On our dining room table we have a bowl of flower bulbs sitting in water with rocks, sprouting roots and green shoots.  Since there is no soil, nourishment comes from the bulb itself.  Similarly, with food intake having been almost nil for Loren these past couple of months or more, he is drawing from his stored reserves to keep his body going and mind active. He remains content and grateful.  Tonight I would like to close with a quote from Albert Einstein printed on a beautiful card we received that says it all, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”

Jesus taught his disciples, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)  As seeds and blossoms emerge from soil and bulb and open up their colorful and fragrant blossoms they are visible reminders of the truth Jesus spoke.  But the order is clear:  death first, then…life!

During Lent, God dares us to trust that when we enter fully into the life of his Son—the singing, laughing, crying Jesus—and open the deep, dark soil of our lives to him, his transforming presence will bear fruit in our lives; will bring new breath and life; will reconnect what has become disconnected; will unbind and free us from whatever entombs us.

Is it possible, amidst the busy fullness of this month’s calendar, that our gatherings around Word and Sacrament could become occasions for the Spirit of God to “touch and mend and rouse our dry bones from their grave”? That’s where my hope is invested!

Pastor Erik