Below is the prayer one of my pastor colleagues shared with our Covenant anti-racist clergy cohort group this morning as part of the devotional. It is by Nadia Bolz-Weber, an author and Lutheran pastor. She expresses her longing for God to intervene in the agony and corruption of our world (and our hearts and minds). Can you pray this along with the rest of us who are clinging to the Spirit with hope for full restoration in Christ alone?

God,

You once tore open the heavens and descended as a dove upon Jesus and a dirty river full of repentant people.

I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but now would be a good time to tear open the heavens and send down that dove again.

Send your Holy Spirit to stir up repentance in your people:

Who would rather double down than admit we were wrong

Who fill with pride at being one of the few who “know the real truth” 

Who only manage to point to others and never ourselves, (and are maybe a tiny bit grateful for the obvious, overt racism, violence and xenophobia of others since it conveniently takes the spotlight off of our own)

I pray that you send your Holy Spirit comfort your people:

Who are grieving our dead. 

Whose rightful rage might be corroding the edges of our hearts – (because those hearts are still needed elsewhere)

Who have had to break up with abusers or draw boundaries with unstable people in the past and know in our bodies how ugly this all gets

Who have joyous news they feel they cannot share

Who are trying (and failing) to still love those who voted differently than themselves

Who literally or figuratively find themselves (yet again) sweeping up the detritus of others’ racism, violence, and ignorance

Send down that dove, Lord, but help us look to the needs of our neighbor and not to the escape hatch of heaven to find her.

Amen. 

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Epiphany

We know the word: a moment of piercing awareness, the sudden jolt of understanding. Imagine, then, that moment stretched out over a period of time. This is the season of Epiphany, a season celebrating the revelation of the Savior, the light of the world. 

Epiphany begins on January 6 and is marked by several events and themes in the life of Jesus: the visit of the Magi, the baptism of Jesus, and the wedding feast at Cana. He is the worshiped King of kings, the dearly loved Son of God and the miracle-working Lord of the feast. As we journey through Epiphany, which leads up to Lent, we catch sight of the uniqueness of Christ. This is no mere prophet or teacher—this is the Son of God, the Messiah! 

There is an unmistakable missional bent to Epiphany. Jesus, the light of the world, calls us to let our light shine before others (Mt 5:14-16). Drawn by the light of his star, the Magi came and signaled the universal scope of Jesus' mission, where the nations of the world come to worship the King of kings. Epiphany calls us to live God's mission, announcing the good news of Christ's arrival to every culture, and to those who live across the street, bearing the light of Jesus to the nations and to those who share a home with us. 

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people... the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Titus 2:11-13

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

A liturgy for the end of one year and beginning of another:

O God of the night,

We come to you holding every loss, fear and anxiety of the season. The night has felt too long. Help us to remember how it held our grief. Help us to honor every tear, every wail of the night, knowing what we've lost is worthy of grieving. Thank you for not rushing into the light, but growing and arriving with a sacred slowness. That we would be able to bring our full selves into the light as we have been known by the dark.

... these final hours of darkness can feel like the longest wait. Sustain us, God. Allow us to look toward the morning while being fully present in the fatigue of now, giving our souled bodies what they need in order to set and heal. And when we wake, let us be patient with our joy—that we would not empty it of all grieving, but find it only magnified as we hold the tension of a story formed in the dark and the light.
(@blackliturgies)

As we sit in this first day of 2021, as faithful people of God in stories that are mixed with joys and sorrows, praises and protests and pleas, please deepen our hope.

Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering "it will be happier."
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Image: "The Flight Into Egypt" by Henry Ossawa Tanner.

"Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home."

— G.K. Chesterton

First Coming

He did not wait till the world was ready,

till men and nations were at peace.

He came when the Heavens were unsteady,

and prisoners cried out for release.

He did not wait for the perfect time.

He came when the need was deep and great.

He dined with sinners in all their grime,

turned water into wine. He did not wait

till hearts were pure. In joy he came

to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.

To a world like ours, of anguished shame

he came, and his Light would not go out.

He came to a world which did not mesh,

to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.

In the mystery of the Word made Flesh

the Maker of the stars was born.

We cannot wait till the world is sane

to raise our songs with joyful voice,

for to share our grief, to touch our pain,

He came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

-- Madeleine L'Engle

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

“No powerful person dares to approach the manger, and this even includes King Herod. For this is where thrones shake, the mighty fall, the prominent perish, because God is with the lowly. Here the rich come to nothing, because God is with the poor and hungry, but the rich and satisfied he sends away empty. Before Mary, the maid, before the manger of Christ, before God in lowliness, the powerful come to naught; they have no right, no hope; they are judged. …

“Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness. …

“And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly … God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”

“I believe that God can and will bring good out of evil, even out of the greatest evil. For that purpose, he needs men [and women] who make the best use of everything. I believe that God will give us all the strength we need to help us to resist in all times of distress. But he never gives it in advance, lest we should rely on ourselves and not on him alone. A faith such as this should allay all our fears for the future.”

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Martha then said to Jesus, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." John 11:21

"Jesus, if you had been here..."

This has undoubtedly been a year filled with grief that has left us crying out to Jesus, "If you had been here." Like Martha, we have had far to much pain to be polite with God so instead we must be honest with God.

Jesus, if you had been in a Louisville apartment just minutes past midnight on March 13th, a young woman named Breonna would never have been murdered in her sleep. Jesus, if you had run with Ahmaud on February 23rd the way so many did in the wake of his lynching, he would still be alive. Jesus, if you had been in the decision rooms of our government as a deadly pandemic was beginning then perhaps 281,000 of our loved ones would still be here. Jesus, if you had been there for those eight minutes and forty six seconds. Selah.

Now imagine Jesus weeping with us, and weeping with you as you lament your own personal losses. Jesus is personally affected by our grief, and still powerfully anointed over the grave. This Advent, we weep with Jesus and await his resurrection and life in this earth.
(@adventseason)

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

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