The Pastor’s Blog
February 2010
February 15th, 2010
From Bishop Martin Well's newsletter in the Eastern Washington-Idaho Synod, there is this nice little gem of a quote that he found: Pastor Martin Niemoller, former U-Boat captain and foe of Hitler during World War II said years later: "It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. He's not even the enemy of His enemies."
February 8th, 2010
A great Superbowl... the saints prevail, which is not a bad thing to remember, always! <g>
February 4, 2010
Where did January go!?!! It was the warmest month ever. I was driving into church this morning and saw the flowering pink bushes-trees in bloom and there are crocus blooming in our church parking lot! While the east coast is getting snow and cold weather, we are truly blessed with a mild winter this year. So much so that it is confusing the plants! Some bird songs are being sung and that seems early too.
Lent is coming up on the 17th and for our staff devotions we read a little out of Frederick Buechner's book "Whistling in the Dark" -- here is some of the section on the subject of Lent:
In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year's income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the 40 days of Lent is to do the same with roughly a tenth of each year's days. . . During Lent Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves:
"If you have to bet everything you have on where there is a God or whether there isn't, which side would get your money and why? If you had only one last message to leave behind to a handful of people who are most important to you, what would you it be in 25 words or less? Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you happiest to remember?
To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are the start of it, something like Easter may be the end."
February 2, 2010
With the gospel of Simon dropping the nets in the deep water this week, a couple of nice thoughts...
If you have tried to do something and failed, you are vastly better off than if you tried to do nothing and succeeded.
Bill Cosby realized in the eighth grade he wanted to be a comedian, when he got laughs telling his classmates what it was like growing up with his brothers in a poor part of Philadelphia. Says Cosby: "With my teacher's permission, I walked to the front of the classroom and faced my first audience. 'I share a bed with my little brother,' I began, 'but he's not little enough.' The laughter hit me like a drug. 'Y'see, he keeps touching me, and I don't like a bed that feels like a bus.' More laughter. 'And sometime he thinks the bed is a boxing ring, but he never goes to a neutral corner.' Their laughter was even a sweeter sound than the tinkle of change in my father's pants. It was the only vocational guidance I would ever need."
December 2009
December 31st, 2009
At the end of this year, blessings to you all! The last decade as been, well ,interesting. Massive
changes in our society, our attitudes and our ways to be a family, community and nation happened over the last ten years. Just the idea of taking your shoes off at an airport in order to get on a jet was unthinkable in 1999. To be at war for the better part of the decade made war a part of our background noise of life. Children under the age of 8 have never known a time when we weren't at war. Being a Christian, that saddens me and I hope we are always uncomfortable with the idea of violence and death, no matter what the cause or the beating of the drum. Blessed are the peacemakers, our Lord teaches. Being a child in the 1960's, to have an African-American president is a wonderful move forward that I didn't expect to see in my lifetime. I remember the Civil Rights days well and that day seemed far off - when we remember that people couldn't even sit at a lunch counter, Rosa Parks had to sit at the back of the bus and educational opportunities were not equal among the races. Interesting to ponder what this all means for the decade of the "tens.." Where will we all be in 2019?
Through it all, we are thankful as Christians. I always enjoy those "year in review" pieces on TV. This is our world. It is the gift of God. This is the time of our lives, the gift of a beating heart, a sound (mostly) mind and an active life is something to be very grateful for in life.
I guess that's how we leave 2009 behind. We made it. Now, time to raise the anchor and set the sails for the distant shore of 2010! It's going to be an exciting voyage with God at the helm!
December 16, 2009
"When it comes down to being a provider of God's love, there is really only one provider, who sends us out with nothing at all and with everything we need: healing, forgiveness, restoration, resurrection. Those are the only things we really have to share with the world, which is just as well, since they are the only things the world really needs."
- Barbara Brown Taylor, from her book Bread of Angels
December 14, 2009
And a Happy New Year....
Well, we
can
finally start naming the years without wondering what to do
with that zero… was last year “double-nought 9,”
“zero-zero 9,” “zero 9” or “Oh 9?”
2010 is so much easier!
Twenty-ten. I like
the way that sounds. It is
just amazing to think of how far in the future that seemed back in 1950
when Faith Lutheran was just getting started. For someone alive in 1950,
it would be looking sixty years forward over the horizon of time.
Now, here is something fun to mentally think about: look back
those same 60 years from that 1950 perspective. You end up with 1890!
How ancient! How
primitive! No airplanes, no
telephones, not even electricity for a lot of people.
No freeways, no social security, no cars for that matter.
Horse and buggy days and long distance travel was only for the
wealthy. Christmas was all
about church, family and candles on the tree that had to be carefully
watched. Yes, 1890 was a
long ways back from 1950.
Yet, for our present world of 2010,
people will look back from their time in 2070 with the same sense
of progress and time flowing.
Things we can’t even imagine in this cell phone and internet
connected world will happen.
Medicine, knowledge and science will find wonders.
Humanity will find ways to be creative, to survive. There will be
“wars and rumors of wars” for sure. Natural disasters will always happen
as human beings forget nature’s power, perhaps with even greater
violence as the climate changes.
We are blessed with a future.
No matter what your life is like at this moment you have a future
given to you by God. We
might name it “20-10” but really, it’s just a wonderful possibility
right now. A blank piece of
paper, a canvas that needs a painter, an unformatted hard drive— what
ever the image is in your mind, it is here. We put up a new wall
calendar. What happens next is something theologians and philosophers
wonder about. We will write
the next year’s history over the next 12 months.
Will it be our free will and the decisions we make?
Is it all predetermined by God?
What about human responsibility and God’s grace?
What does God want us to do with 2010?
What do I do with 2010? What will change or shock or amaze in
2010?
The one thing we certainly proclaim is that this coming year is a gift.
We did nothing to earn it or to claim it.
It is simply there for us to use as good stewards of God’s
blessing. It’s a gracious
gift. God gives us this
future and a future hope on this planet Earth, his creation and his
beloved world. The Word
speaks of the future as in God’s good hands, of all that will be being
his.
I close with Frederick Buechner, a Christian author who joined us as a
part of the PLU Christmas concert readings:
“Inhabitants of time that we are, we stand. . .with one foot in eternity.
God, as Isaiah says (57:15), “Inhabiteth
eternity” but stands with one foot in time.
The part of time he stands most particularly is Christ, and thus
in Christ we catch a glimpse of what eternity is all about, what God is
all about, and we ourselves are all about, too.”
Or maybe better put, "I begin" with Frederick Buechner - begin 2010.
God with one foot in eternity and one foot in time - a wonderful
and mysterious image of Christmas truth.
Blessed new year, a merry Christmas time of grace— Pastor Mark
November 2009
November 23rd, 2009
The 2009 Seattle Seahawks are God's gentle reminder to men that you have more important things to do this afternoon than sit in front of a television for three hours.
November 19, 2009
Sometimes you run into some nice quotes that are old friends in sermon preparation. Let me share a couple. The first one is from the Abraham Lincoln lectures Ronald White gave at Seattle Pacific last month, focused on his spirituality and faith. It is a very complex subject and Professor White did a fine job in focusing on the Second Inauguration Address as an example. In the course of the lecture he shared this quote from Lincoln:
"The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country."
Of course, every age finds this to be true. The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. In a world that is filled with change, it's nice to think that in 1863 that generation had to rethink it's prime mission. And then there is a quote from Martin Luther King Jr which was on a poster from Lutheran campus ministry a few years back:
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a
descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead
of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder
the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In
fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence
multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of
stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do
that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that."
The Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr
Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community
Whatever your world is like on this windy, rainy dark November day, it's worth travelling with those quotes in mind as you go through the day!
November 18, 2009
We have had a couple of exciting days. This morning, we are meeting with ELCA and Synod staffers to discuss the Lutheran mission alongside the Chinese on the Eastside. The foreign mission fields of old are now the local mission fields. Faith Lutheran just might play a pivotal role in spreading the Gospel among our Chinese neighbors on the Eastside. It's going to be interesting to see how that works. The days of national church bodies planting new mission congregations is just about over. It's now decentralized and local, which is the way Lutherans spread the gospel here in Puget Sound in the 1920s. Larger churches started smaller satellite congregations to serve the community. Some of the congregations then grew and became large themselves. Faith was helped in its early days by congregations in Bellevue sharing pastoral staff.
And then yesterday, our new lighting and sound committee did some dreaming and came up with a couple of neat possibilities to make our worship space more inviting and bright. I think you'll be excited to see what they came up with! And then our council meeting spent over an hour talking over our mission and what we could do together at Faith Lutheran Church! That's always fun. We talked about the small groups we used to have in the early 1990's and how that was a benefit for that generation. Then this morning I got this little email clip which is pretty funny, gently poking fun at the the old and the new ways of being a community of faith... enjoy, no matter if you are a PC or a Mac! Big group or small...
November 8, 2009
"When I fed the poor and the hungry they called me a saint. When I asked 'why are these people poor and hungry?,' they called me a communist."
The wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver, from her poem "Wild Geese"
Finally, a visual treat of God's creation from about 900 feet as I was climbing out of Harvey Airfield in Snohomish. A Canadian Goose's view of the Snohomish River looking down toward Duval, in it's fall glory -
October
October 2