We are now in the four weeks of Advent 2020. It will be a Christmas like none we can remember, with all kinds of reasons to be concerned, careful, and wishing life was other than it is. Family gatherings, parties of friends and colleagues, shared meals and much else will likely be constrained. But there will still be Christmas. What doesn’t change is the coming of Christ into a broken world, on a dark night illumined by a star, and in the crowded resentments of a country under Roman lockdown for tax purposes. (Sound familiar?)

In all the understandable anxieties and fatigue following nine months of pandemic upheaval, certain things are still true: Christ comes as Immanuel, God with us; the child is called Jesus, the savior of the world; the angels sang of God’s promised purpose of peace on earth and good-will among all peoples; shepherds worshipped, wise travelers brought gifts, Mary pondered all that was happening. All still true.

There’s a lot we won’t be able to do at Christmas; but caring for others isn’t one of them. As a community of Jesus, we are witnesses to the love of God in the gift of Christ. We have opportunity to carry out our Kingdom assignments for Advent. Perhaps a more limited Christmas will enable us to reflect on the love of God for our broken world, and then to reflect that same love of God upon our broken world. May it be so! 

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Because You Hid Yourself

By Debie Thomas. Posted 22 November 2020.

For Sunday November 29, 2020

Lectionary Readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year B)

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
1 Corinthians 1:3-9
Mark 13:24-37

If someone had told me back in February that we would still be in the thick of the Covid pandemic nine months later — wearing masks, staying away from our loved ones, “attending” church over Zoom or YouTube, and watching in horror as the global death toll rises — I would not have believed them. But here we still are. On the verge of another liturgical season and a new Church year, here we still are. Bewildered, grieving, fearful, and exhausted.  Haunted (if we’re honest), by the question “good Christians” are often afraid to ask: Where is God?

Luckily for us, the Biblical writers do not share our reticence about naming and lamenting God’s hiddenness. "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down," cries Isaiah in our Old Testament reading for this first Sunday of the season. "Restore us, O Lord of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved," pleads the Psalmist. "The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken," says Jesus in Mark's Gospel, describing a state of godless catastrophe I wish I didn't recognize in the world around me.

What an odd way to usher in Advent. What a bizarre way to shout, “Happy New Year, Church!” Is this really where we’re supposed to begin? By naming the elephant in the room so explicitly? So baldly?

Like some of you, I didn't grow up observing Advent. Since my childhood church didn't follow the liturgical calendar, my family went straight from Thanksgiving turkeys and pumpkin pies to Christmas trees and "Jingle Bells" — one consumer feeding frenzy pressing hard into the next. It’s only in the past few years that I have come to value what Nora Gallagher calls the "counterweight" of liturgical time. "One time set against another." It’s only recently that I have embraced the stark, hard-edged gifts Advent provides. This year in particular, I believe we need these gifts desperately.

According to the week's readings, we enter this first season of the Christian New Year — if we dare enter it at all — in lamentation. Eschewing all forms of denial, polite piety, and cheap cheer, we allow the radical honesty of Scripture to make us honest, too. "How long will you be angry with your people's prayers?" asks the Psalmist in desperation.  "Because you hid yourself, we transgressed," cries Isaiah.  During Advent, we stop posturing and pretending. We quit trying to make God’s hiddenness okay. We shed our greeting card assumptions about the Divine.  We get real.

"Our world is not okay," is what these Advent readings declare in stark, unflinching terms. God's apparent absence is not fine — it hurts. It hurts so much we can barely breathe from the agony of it. We are surrounded by evil and suffering, we're not sure our faith can endure what our eyes reluctantly witness each day, and though we long for a Savior to rend the heavens and come down, the very ferocity of that longing is wearying our souls.  Hope itself has become a grind.

The first gift of Advent is the permission to tell the truth, even if that truth is laced with sorrow. We are invited to describe life "on earth as it is," and not as we mistakenly assume our religion requires us to render it. Into our surrounding cultures of denial and spin, apathy and hedonism, we are called to speak the whole truth: we need God.  We need God to show up.  We need God to stay.  We need God to love, hold, deliver, and restore us.  We were created for intimacy with a just, gracious, and profoundly compassionate Savior, and when that intimacy is missing, we suffer.  

The second gift of the season is less a "gift" than a discipline.  It is the discipline of waiting.  During Advent, we live with quiet anticipation in the "not yet."  We stop rushing and decide to call sacred what is yet in-process and unformed.  As Paul puts it in this week's reading from 1st Corinthians, we "wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ."

This is no easy task in today’s world, which applauds arrivals, finish lines, shortcuts, and end products, far more than it does the meandering journey or odd way station. Eugene Peterson calls the Christian life "a long obedience in the same direction," and I don't think we can get more counter-cultural than that. If the secular world speeds past darkness to the safe certainty of light, then Advent reminds us that necessary things — things worth waiting for — happen in the soft, fertile dark. Next spring's seeds break open in dark winter soil. God's Spirit hovers over dark water, preparing to create worlds. The child we yearn for grows in the deep darkness of the womb.

I wonder if years from now, when we look back on these bleak months of the pandemic, we will recognize these days of waiting — waiting for a vaccine, waiting for a cure, waiting for a return to our normal social lives — as paradoxical treasures.  Learning to wait for God is akin to learning a new form of physical exercise. Waiting is a muscle, and it has to be worked, toned, sculpted, and shaped over a sustained period of time.  To sit and wait for God — not in bitterness, not with cynicism, not in fake and frozen piety — is serious spiritual work.  But it is the invitation of Advent. To wait.

Thirdly, Advent prepares us for the God who is coming — a God who will turn out to be very different from the one we expect and maybe even hope to find.

I am always struck by the difference between the Biblical passages we read during Advent, and the ones we shift to when Christmas finally arrives. This week, Isaiah longs for a Very Big God to do Very Big Things. Recalling the history of the Exodus, he asks God to once again do "awesome deeds" — deeds that will make the mountains quake and the nations tremble. Come to us as fire, he pleads. Fire that kindles and burns, fire that sets the world boiling. Who among us has not prayed such prayers? For the past nine months, my prayers have been as outsized as Isaiah's:  Bring an end to the pandemic.  Protect the most vulnerable.  Strengthen healthcare workers.  Help the unemployed.  Spare the children.  Save the world!

But why stop there? Why not go further? Eradicate all illness.  Clean up the mess in Washington D.C.  End world hunger.  Root out corruption.  Destroy systemic racism.  Thwart corporate greed.  Protect this wounded planet before we ravage it past saving, and most of all shield us, O Lord, from our sinful, self-destructive selves. "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!"

I don't believe I can — or should — stop praying these prayers. God is big, and when I come to God in prayer, dreaming of a just and wholly redeemed world, I know I'm dreaming a tiny version of God's own dream.  But during Advent, I am asked to prepare myself for something else.  Someone else.  Someone so unexpected and so small, I'm tempted to either laugh or cry at the thought of him. The world is falling apart, my heart is exhausted, people are dying, and God chooses to send me … a baby?

In his sermon entitled, "The Face in the Sky," Frederick Buechner describes the Incarnation as a kind of scandal — one that requires us to ponder the shocking unpredictability of God:

"Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in the stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of humankind. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant's child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too."

What are we to make of this? The God who is limitless chooses limits: one womb, one backwater town, one bygone century, one brief life, one agonizing death. The salvation we long for is not the salvation he brings. These are not easy or comfortable truths to accept; they're truths to wrestle with hard and long. Truths to weep over. Truths to receive with gentleness and care.

Come Christmas, I want to be ready to receive God as God is. Not as I might wish God to be, or insist God become. Advent is my time to prepare for the Savior who is.

So.  Here we are.  Exactly where we need to be.  Here we are, wrestling with the brokenness of the world and the hiddenness of our God.  Here we are, voicing our laments and registering our yearnings.  Here we are, waiting.  Here we are, preparing ourselves for the God who is coming.

“Oh, that you would tear the heavens and come down.” This is an honest prayer, and we need not fear it.  It's okay to pray into the silence, the hiddenness, and the absence.  It's okay to struggle with Advent and its complicated gifts.

So, pray and wait.  Wait and pray.  As much as you can, be patient.  Be still.  Hope fiercely.  Deep in the gathering dark, something tender is forming.  Something beautiful — something for the world's saving — waits to be born.

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

This month of November is Indigenous Peoples Month, and in the spirit of learning more about and celebrating a culture that is not my own, I learned a very interesting story about the Navajo people that is one to be proud of. Early in World War II, the Japanese army was alarmingly adept at deciphering the codes American forces were using in the Pacific theater. Their ability to anticipate American military actions, as well as to transmit false orders to American troops, was causing massive confusion and giving the Japanese the upper hand in the war.

The U.S. army responded by developing ever more complex codes, but these became burdensome and made effective communication almost impossible; generals complained that some messages took up to two hours to encode, transmit, and then decode. 

The Navajo people had the answer. Led by Philip Johnston, the son of a white missionary to the Navajo reservation, they made a presentation to the military, using the Navajo language as a military code. The Navajos were able to transmit in twenty seconds a coded message that was taking the military coding machines thirty minutes to handle. And so, the Navajo code talkers program was born.

Navajo code talkers transmitted messages during every major American campaign in the Pacific arena from that time forward, and the Japanese were never able to decipher their code. At the famous battle of Iwo Jima specifically, six Navajo code talkers transmitted more than 800 messages over the course of two days, all without a single error. Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

It’s scary to imagine what might have happened in World War II as a whole without the Navajo code talkers. They were courageous soldiers—and a key part of America’s victory—who used their language to save thousands of American lives and win the war. (I find it particularly ironic that it was through their language that the Navajos came to the aid of America, since the U.S. government has tried hard to take the Navajo language away from them through the boarding school system. It’s a good thing, on so many levels, that those efforts failed.)

The more you know…

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

In our facing the global coronavirus uptick, staggering fatigue and flagging energy and optimism for many, natural disasters and mundane domestic crises in our families, and a fraught Presidential transition, we can grow weary and disheartened. Leaning into the invitation to examine the barriers to full expression of God's Mosaic Kingdom is personal and challenging for all. It requires stamina and intentionality. Where will we find our strength and hope? With none but the High God:

God is a safe place to hide,
ready to help when we need him.
We stand fearless at the cliff-edge of doom,
courageous in sea storm and earthquake,
before the rush and roar of oceans,
the tremors that shift mountains.
Jacob-wrestling God fights for us,
God of angel armies protects us.
River fountains splash joy, cooling God's city,
this sacred haunt of the Most High.
God lives here, the streets are safe,
God at your service from crack of dawn.
Godless nations rant and rave,
kings and kingdoms threaten,
but Earth does anything he says.
Jacob-wrestling God fights for us,
God of angel armies protects us.
Attention, al! See the marvels of God!
He plants flowers and trees all over the earth,
Bans war from pole to pole,
breaks all the weapons across the knee.
"Step out of the traffic! Take a long,
loving look at me, your High God,
above politics, above everything."
Psalm 46 (The Message)

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

I shared with you last week one of W. David O. Taylor's (Fuller- Texas) prayers before the election, but I so appreciated his full complement of prayers-- they can still be prayed, beyond Election Day, as we are in this period of waiting for clarity and finality in our fractured country. Lord, hear our prayers:

Starting on October 28, I committed to writing seven Collect Prayers connected to Election Day 2020. I wrote them in response to specific events of the particular day, such as my visit to the local polling station in order to vote early and the kind service of poll workers that I experienced that day, and to things that I observed in the news as well as on social media. Here they are, in the order in which they were written, and I am more than happy for people to make use of them in their personal or communal contexts.

A COLLECT PRAYER FOR PEACEMAKERS:
O God, you who are the lover of concord, we pray that we might not become needlessly anxious over the political tempests that rage across the landscape of our country but rather trust in your sovereign care, so that we might remain a peacemaker to friend and stranger alike. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

A COLLECT PRAYER FOR POLL WORKERS:
O Lord, you who come to us as a servant, we pray today for all who serve as poll workers. Bless them with joy, protect them from harm, and shield them from all technological failures, so that they may fulfill the good work that you have called them to do. In your name. Amen.

A COLLECT PRAYER FOR DISAGREEMENTS WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS:
O Lord, you who tell us to turn the other cheek, we pray that our disagreements with family, arguments with friends, and troubling encounters with strangers will bring out the best, not the worst, in us so that we might be living emblems of your gracious kingdom in a chronically and regrettably graceless time. In your name. Amen.

A COLLECT PRAYER FOR THE LOVE OF TRUTH:
O Lord, you who come to us as the Truthful One, keep our tongues, we pray, from bearing false witness against our neighbor and guard our mouths from lies, and nourish within us a love for the truth wherever we may find it, so that we might be a people who bear your name. In the name of the One who comes to us full of truth and grace. In your name. Amen.

A COLLECT PRAYER FOR OUR WOUNDED COUNTRY:
O Jesus, you who are the Wounded Healer, we offer to you our wounded lives, our wounded communities and our wounded country and ask that you would heal them, so that we might know you as the One who daily bears our burdens and who consoles the brokenhearted. In your name we pray. Amen.

A COLLECT PRAYER FOR UNITY OF CHRIST’S DIVIDED BODY:
Lord Jesus, you who prayed that we might be one as you and the Father are one, grant us the grace this day to extend the right hand of fellowship to fellow saints across political lines, so that a watching world may see that your Spirit’s power is far greater than all the fracturing powers that would keep us separated and suspicious of one another. In your name we pray. Amen.

A COLLECT PRAYER FOR THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE:
O Lord, to you whom all our loyalties are due, we pledge allegiance this day to the Lamb of God and to the upside-down Kingdom for which he stands, one holy nation, under God, the Servant King and the Prince of Peace, with liberty and justice for all without remainder. In the Triune Name we pray.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Found prayers for the week before Election 2020:

I wait quietly before God,

For my victory comes from him.

He alone is my rock and my salvation,

My fortress where I will never be shaken.

            Psalm 62:1-2

Lord, in these dark and difficult times, grant us grace to seek your face with undiminished love. Replenish our reserves for the road is long. Surprise us in the coming day with glimpses of your goodness, hints of your holiness and a song of hope in this very strange land.

(Lectio 365)

Yet this I call to mind

And therefore have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

For his compassions never fail

They are new every morning:

Great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;

Therefore I will wait for him.”

The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,

To the one who seeks him;

It is good to wait quietly

For the salvation of the Lord.”

            Lamentations 3:21-26

O God, you who are the lover of concord, we pray that we might not become needlessly anxious over the political tempests that rage across the landscape of our country but rather trust in your sovereign care, so that we might remain a peacemaker to friend and stranger alike. Amen. (an election day collect prayer for peace of mind by W. David O. Taylor)

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Forgiving Our Differences

I want to share an extended essay by Fr. Ron Rolheiser, written ten years ago. He has beautifully described the challenge of embracing differences in a world designed by God for variety and diversity. 

In the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin, Doris Lessing, shares this story: During her marriage to Gottfried Lessing, it became evident to both of them at a point that they were simply incompatible as a married couple and that they would eventually have to seek a divorce. However, for practical reasons, they decided to live together, as friends, until they could both move to England, at which time they would file for a divorce. Their marriage was finished but unexpectedly their friendship began to grow. They had accepted their incompatibility as a fact and as something that didn’t call for resentment from either of them. Why be angry at someone just because she feels and thinks differently than we do? 

One night, lying in their separate beds in the same room, both smoking and unable to sleep, Gottfried said to her: This kind of incompatibility is more of a misfortune than a crime. That’s a mature insight: It’s not a crime or a sin to be incompatible, it’s only unfortunate.
 
Would that in our daily lives we could appropriate that truth because there is an important emotional, intellectual, moral, and religious challenge contained in it. We spend too much time and energy angry and frustrated with each other over something that basically we cannot control or change. Our differences, however much they may frustrate us and tax our patience at times, are not a crime, a sin, or indeed (most times) even anyone’s fault. We don’t need to blame someone, be angry at someone, or resent someone because he or she is different than we are, no matter how much those differences separate us, frustrate us, and try our patience and understanding. 

We shouldn’t blame and resent each other for being different. Yet that is what we invariably do. We resent others, especially those closest to us in our families, in our churches, and in our places of work, because they are different than we are, as if they were to blame for those differences. Funny, how we rarely reverse that and blame ourselves. But, generally we blame someone or something. Incompatibility within families, church circles, and professional circles, rarely helps produce respect and friendship, as it did between Gottfried and Doris Lessing. The opposite is true. Our differences generally become a source of division, anger, resentment, bitterness, and recrimination. We positively blame the other person for the incompatibility as if it was a moral fault or a willful separation…

Who is to blame? Who’s at fault? If anyone is to be blamed, let’s blame nature and God. 

We can blame nature for its prodigal character, for its overwhelming abundance, for its staggering variety, for its billions of species, for its bewildering differences within the same species, and for its proclivity to give us novelty and color beyond imagination. We can also blame God for placing us in a universe whose magnitude, diversity, and complexity befuddles both the intellect and the imagination. Our universe is still growing both in size and in variation, with change as it’s only constant. God and nature, it would appear, do not believe in simplicity, uniformity, blandness, and sameness. We aren’t born into this world off conveyor-belts like cars coming off a factory line. The infinite combination of accidents, circumstance, chance, and providence that conspire to make up our specific and individual DNA is too complex to ever be calculated or even concretely imagined. 

But blame isn’t the proper verb here, even if in our frustrations with our differences we feel that we need to blame someone. God and nature shouldn’t be blamed for providing us with so much richness, for setting us into a world with so much color and variety, and for making our own personalities so deep and complex. How boring life would be if we weren’t forever confronted with novelty, variety, and difference. How boring the world would be if everything were the same color, if all flowers were of one kind, and if all personalities were the same as ours. We would pay a high price for the easy peace and understanding that would come from that uniformity.

Gottfried Lessing was an agnostic and a Marxist, not an easy friend to Christianity. But we (who vow ourselves by our baptism to understanding, empathy, forgiveness, and peace-making) should be strongly and healthily challenged by his insight and understanding: It’s not a sin or a crime to be incompatible, it’s only unfortunate.
 
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Some Christians think that racial reconciliation is a liberal, politically motivated social agenda that has nothing to do with their faith as followers of Jesus Christ. So many discipled Christians don't know that the gospel includes reconciliation across racial, gender, ethnic, social and cultural barriers. Discipleship is an invitation to follow Jesus into a new community, the Kingdom of God, where we are called to make disciples who create corporate social change as people who love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves. This means that all churches must face the ways in which they have fallen short of this gospel mission. God has the power to raise up disciples who are agents of racial healing. We need the Holy Spirit to transform us and dismantle the racism that is insidious and entrenched in hearts, systems and institutions. We are members of a Kingdom that prioritizes racial justice, patterned on the reconciliation won for all by Jesus' death and resurrection. May God be glorified as we pray for him to bring his resurrection power to the brokenness all around us!

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

We are designed for good! There is beauty inherent in each of our ethnic identities, but cultural idolatry and racial brokenness have torn apart God's intended multiethnic community. 'Colorblindness', though originally well-intentioned, is inhospitable, a failure to recognize the beautiful differences that must be acknowledged order for us to move forward in grace to others. We all need to be 'ethnicity aware' , examining what we need healing from, so that we do not unintentionally or willfully cause damage to others with our unexamined sin. Our Growth Groups are asking these questions in the coming weeks:

What are some broken responses you have had to your ethnic identity? What are experiences of ethnic tension or racism that have affected you, your family or those close to you? How might you engage in confession, lament and repentance for the pain in ethnic communities? Can we weep with Jesus for this brokenness and seek his mercy and restoration? 

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

As World Communion Sunday approaches this year, I have never been so hungry to live into the words of this blessing or simply to gather with others in the ordinary act of sharing a meal. In these days, when that is so often not physically possible, may we learn anew what it means to make the table wide, and wider, and wider still.
 
AND THE TABLE WILL BE WIDE

And the table
will be wide.
And the welcome
will be wide.
And the arms
will open wide
to gather us in.
And our hearts
will open wide
to receive.
And we will come
as children who trust
there is enough.
And we will come
unhindered and free.
And our aching
will be met
with bread.
And our sorrow
will be met
with wine.
And we will open our hands
to the feast
without shame.
And we will turn
toward each other
without fear.
And we will give up
our appetite
for despair.
And we will taste
and know
of delight.
And we will become bread
for a hungering world.
And we will become drink
for those who thirst.
And the blessed
will become the blessing.
And everywhere
will be the feast.
 
            Jan Richardson

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation