This week I have been reading through Matthew 6:25-34 repeatedly, the one where Jesus tells his disciples “Don’t worry.” We all know that when someone is worried, “Don’t worry” is about the worst thing you can say. Not only does it imply that not worrying is something we can simply stop through willpower, but it can also come with a certain amount of shame. Really, Jesus? To worry is human. There is no way Jesus could simply expect us not to worry.
 
But if you are like me, I’d actually like not to worry so much at a time like this, to trust, to have faith. And this is not just related to the pandemic, but about the world in general, the safety and health of my family and friends, future, retirement, etc. 
 
So, I’ve been thinking about this phrase from Jesus, “Don’t worry.” It got me thinking about Buddhism, that begins with the recognition that all of life is suffering. And the key to managing the suffering is not to become attached to the things you think you need. Nonattachment is the Buddhist way to not worry. But Jesus says in this passage something different: he says “Don’t worry, because your heavenly Father has got you.” The way of Jesus, in worry is not to detach; it is actually to attach more deeply to the One who knows what we need before we even ask. 
 
Jesus says, “Don’t worry” and then “Look at the birds” and “consider the lilies.” When you are worried, look and consider. It is not an answer, but it is a way. Don’t worry, dear ones, instead look at God’s creation, consider his goodness and maybe, just maybe, when we look and consider we become able to seek his Kingdom. As Jesus said in John 16, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world.” When you are worried, look, consider and seek. Amen.
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

 "God of the present moment, God who in Jesus stills the storm and soothes the frantic heart; bring hope and courage to all who wait or work in uncertainty.

Bring hope that you will make them the equal of whatever lies ahead. Bring them courage to endure what cannot be avoided, for your will is health and wholeness; you are God, and we need you."

- Adapted from A New Zealand Prayer Book

Our sermon text this week is Jonah 3, his road to the unexpected. Seems incredibly timely...

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

We are diving into Jonah for the next month as a church in our new sermon series, and through Steve Stuckey's artwork and reflections. 

Are you okay with the fact that God loves your enemies? The book of Jonah holds a mirror up to the one who reads it. In Jonah, we see the worst parts of our own character magnified, which should generate humility and gratitude that God would love his enemies and put up with the Jonah in all of us. This strange story (which comes to a close abruptly with no clear ending) becomes a message of good news of God's mercy that ought to challenge us to the core. 

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

For Lent this year, we are inviting the whole congregation to be on retreat with Jonah! In a collaborative effort with Steve Stuckey, our talented artist in residence, we are asking you to dedicate yourselves to times of prayer and reflection on the themes from the book of Jonah. Steve has curated a gallery exhibit in the prayer room off the lobby, an interactive series of paintings and images designed to lead you deeper into the mysteries of life with our determined God. There will be weekly contemplative materials available for you to take home for further reflection during the week, four in all. There are also Visio Divina cards, reproductions of art images with a meditative prompt to nudge you with provocative questions.

How does a whole church go on retreat for 40 days until Easter? By coming early or staying late after worship to tour the gallery and immerse yourselves in the story of Jonah's journey with his God. By praying and reflecting, through journaling or making your own creative responses to the weekly sessions at home. And by finding ways as a family to grasp and speak of the relationship between Jonah and a God on mission--read the Scripture out loud together, talk about the story during the week. 

40 days. Just imagine what God can do in 40 days with people who are surrendered to the Spirit and eager to be transformed!

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Beloved of God, every year at the time of Easter, the Christian Passover, we celebrate our redemption through the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. We begin this holy season of Lent by remembering our need for repentance, and for the mercy and forgiveness proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We begin our journey to Easter on Ash Wednesday (February 26) with the sign of ashes, an ancient sign, speaking of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, and marking the penitence of the community as a whole. The sanctuary will be open from 6-8 AM, 12-1 PM and 5-7 PM for meditation and reflection and the imposition of ashes.

Blessing the Dust – A Blessing for Ash Wednesday— by Jan RIchardson

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial –

did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made
and the stars that blaze
in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Amazing and merciful God, how easy it is for us to forget that we are your delight. You rejoice when we follow your holy ways and envision a future of goodness and grace for all your people. We blame you for divisions and strife. We justify our wars by saying that you are on our side. We rationalize the abuse of our enemies by telling ourselves that they are not your people, that their sinfulness exceeds your tolerance. In truth, you have told us that we are to love our neighbors indiscriminately. Moreover, we are to love those with the greatest need more fiercely and more immediately. Shower us with your mercy, O God, until we live by the plumb line you have repeatedly dropped in our midst.

Patient and steadfast God, you continuously call us to live in peace, leaving none behind. We hear your call. We know that your love endures forever. What you ask of us is not beyond our reach; it is not higher than the heavens or on the outer edges of the sea. For all of Creation to live in justice is not an impossibility you hold up to tease us with what we cannot have. If we trust you, it is possible for us to turn aside from our human ways. It is possible for us to love with your love. Enter our lives anew, Holy One, silence our fears and smother our distrust that we may live in harmony with all.

God of wonder and mystery, you love us still. You love us when we are filled with fear. You love us when we are filled with hate. You love us when we are filled with judgment. You love us when we think we are better than our neighbors. You love us when we think our neighbors are better than us. You love us when we blame others for creating the chaos that flows through the world. You love us when we abdicate responsibility for engaging in justice work. You love us through all our foolishness. However, you delight in us when we act with love and seek to bring your realm into the here and now. Flood every corner of our being with the strength of your Spirit that we may have the courage to love with your love, always!

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Some weeks when we as staff pray through the congregational prayer requests, we are especially burdened by the weight of sorrow and loss in our beloved community. This was a hard week--many reasons for tears, anguish, uncertainty, anxiety, discouragement and grief.  John 1:5 “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

In the Gospel of John, Jesus uses a lot descriptive language and associates God with light as “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind” (John 1:4) and “While I am in the world, I am the light of the world” (John 9:5), and He most certainly was. 

But, until the light shines again for those whom we love and pray for,  A Blessing for Traveling in the Dark:

Go slow if you can. Slower. More slowly still. Friendly dark or fearsome, this is no place to break your neck by rushing, by running, by crashing into what you cannot see. Then again, it is true: different darks have different tasks, and if you have arrived here unawares, if you have come in peril or in pain, this might be no place you should dawdle. I do not know what these shadows ask of you, what they might hold that means you good or ill. It is not for me to reckon whether you should linger or you should leave. But this is what I can ask for you: That in the darkness there be a blessing. That in the shadows there be a welcome. That in the night you be encompassed by the Love that knows your name.

from Jan Richardson

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Keeping company with CS Lewis this week, as he writes about his struggle to give himself fully in trust to God. Can you relate?

"I say my prayers, I read a book of devotion, I prepare for, or receive, the Sacrament.  But while I do these things, there is, so to speak, a voice inside me that urges caution.  It tells me to be careful, to keep my head, not to go too far, not to burn my boats.  I come into the presence of God with a great fear lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerably inconvenient when I have come out again into my ‘ordinary’ life.  I don’t want to be carried away into any resolution which I shall afterwards regret.  
 
For I know I shall be feeling quite different after breakfast; I don’t want anything to happen to me at the altar which will run up too big a bill to pay then.…The root principle of all these precautions is the same: to guard the things temporal.…This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.…
 
For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves.…For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls.  Let us make up our minds to it; there will be nothing ‘of our own’ left over to live on, no ‘ordinary’ life.…What cannot be admired—what must only exist as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy—is the idea of something that is ‘our own,’ some area in which we are to be ‘out of school,’ on which God has no claim.  For He claims all, because He is love and must bless.  He cannot bless us unless He has us.  When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.  Therefore, in love, He claims all.  There’s no bargaining with Him."                                  

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.     

N.T. Wright   Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

Because  we know all of this to be true, this week let us pray these words from Ephesians 3:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation