Pastor’s Message
If We Believe in Resurrection…
We celebrate Easter with great joy, pomp and circumstance. Every year, we shout our Hallelujahs after having them silenced for seven weeks. And we give thanks for the promise of new life with deep lungfuls of springtime air. And then every week thereafter, we declare ourselves to be people of the resurrection, people who believe in a Christ who conquered death.
So, if we say we believe those things, then what? What does our faith require of us if we say we believe in this resurrection stuff?
It is commonly accepted now that we are in a time of reformation in the church. This means several things. One, that we are moving from one thing to another; to reform means to be undone and redone. Second, a recognition that things are changing means we need to take a moment for lament. The church many of us have known, loved, and grown up in does not look the way it once did. Consequently, grieving becomes an important step in this process, but it would be terrible if that’s where we stopped. Third, we need genuine discernment; during reformation, there is the possibility of being pulled in many different directions, so it is necessary to constantly keep praying, and listening to determine which next step is correct. You don’t get from A to Z without several letters in between. Similarly, you don’t get from formed to reformed without intermediary steps, each of which requires faithful discernment. For we are not reforming ‘for the fun of it’, but out of a true need to re-become Christ’s church. Next, patience is required; just as it takes a large ship time to turn, it takes a long time for an institution to change. Hopefully, this allows the change to happen in a way that can ease as much anxiety as is possible.
Finally, I think the most important thing we need is faith. The good news is that our faith is given to us as a gift of the Spirit, so we don’t need to create it, just to stay in touch with it. I strongly suspect that if we were to step back a bit and observe, beyond our grief, that we would see God at work in our reformation. God in the midst of our undoing and the Spirit leading us toward our new manifestation. And if we do see God in it, then we can take a big sigh of relief, for if God is in it, then all will be well. As Dame Julian of Norwich said, “and all things shall be well.”
On Easter morning, your pastor says with a joyful shout “Christ is Risen!,” to which you respond, with even more gusto “He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!” We believe in a God who can look death in the face and say, ‘you don’t win.’ Our God is a God of life, Jesus is alive! The church of Christ will continue for generations to come, because Jesus lives. I don’t know what it will look like, but I believe in its future because I believe in the resurrection.
May we all look to the Risen Christ and know our future is secure.
Happy Easter! Christ is Risen!
Pastor Joanna +
There are some things in life that can always make you feel like an amateur. For me, some of these things include bowling, pool, calculus, and sometimes – prayer.
I think that for many of us, our first learnings about prayer came from saying grace before our meals and prayers at bedtime. In most cases, we learned form prayers. Come Lord Jesus, For what we are about to receive, and Now I lay me down to sleep are just a few that are very widely used. Through the use of these rote prayers, we learned appropriate times to pray, and appropriate words. This was a good beginning.
The problem is that, for me at least, any deeper learning I wanted to do about prayer had to come largely from myself. Beyond prayers at church, which always used big fancy words and followed a formula, and the prayers I talked about above, I didn’t really learn about ‘freeform’ prayers in Sunday school or confirmation class.
As I grew, I felt like I really wasn’t very good at praying. And when I began seminary, with the idea that I would go into ministry, I was even more unsure of my abilities. One of my biggest fears was being asked to pray out loud, I was sure I would mess it up and make a fool of myself! Fortunately, being asked to pray out loud is kind of a given throughout seminary training and I became more comfortable with doing so. The trouble was, that even though I was getting better at praying out loud, I still felt like I was woefully uninspired in my own prayers.
My children have a storybook, called “Every Which Way to Pray” and I love reading it to them, because it’s a story of two young hippos (because even hippos and sheep and pelicans pray in storybooks!), who have become intimidated by the idea of prayer because of a manual-like book one of them owns on the subject. As they journey through their town, they encounter several characters who disassemble their preconceived notions of prayer and teach them that you can pray however you desire. Towards the end, the local sergeant (a bear named Sarge) explains to them “Prayer is simple. You talk. You listen. You praise. You thank. You ask advice. You stay in touch with your Maker. Period.” [1] And then he adds that it comes from your heart.
I think that Sarge has summed it up quite well for us beginners. Because now I have come to understand that prayer is as much being present to God in my life, surroundings, and heart as it is a conversation. Sometimes prayer is holding a person in my heart and inviting God to join with me. Sometimes, I spend a long time in gratitude. Sometimes, when I can’t find the words, I start with ‘help…’ and then sit there. Sometimes breathing is prayer, or singing my heart out at the top of my lungs feeling joy in every note. Sometimes, when the sun shines and I can feel the warmth on my skin, I turn my face to the sky and breathe in the Spirit – how can that not be a kind of prayer?
I now realize that I’m engaged in prayer throughout my day, in many and varied ways. I pay close attention to my thoughts, because if someone is on my mind, I believe they may very well be in need of a prayer, so I pray for them. And I’m trying to teach this to my kids; that while we do the rote prayers at mealtimes and bedtime, we can also pray in a multitude of other ways as well. We might all be amateurs, but we’re learning together.
How do you pray? Are there ways you pray that you might have not considered to be prayer before? Please tell me about your prayers – so I can learn from you and so that I’ll know better how I can pray for you.
Sharing in Christ’s mission with you,
Pastor Joanna+
[1] Meyer, Joyce. Every Which Way to Pray. © Joyce Meyer, 2011.
The Reformer is always right about what’s wrong.
However, he’s often wrong about what is right.
– G.K. Chesterton
When you really think about it, this is a pretty exciting time to be in the church. 2000 years ago, Jesus walked the earth, and showed us how God relates to us in a new way.
500 years ago, Luther instigated a movement that helped the church move in a direction that Luther believed more accurately represented God and how God relates to God’s children. In the 1500 years between Jesus and Luther, there were many of these moments of shifting and learning, and now 500 years after Luther, we continue to experience this same need for reform and renewal.
The words of G.K. Chesterton above really made me think. I can easily pinpoint many things that the church at large, and things at the congregational level that we could do much better. I can see ways in which we fail to serve our neighbours, ways that we continue to be turned inward, ways that demonstrate poor stewardship. At the same time, I think there are some things that we do right… and this quote has me wondering if I think they are right because I am comfortable with them or if they really are right. Do I feel like we do something right just because I’m afraid of what it would look like to do it differently?
Here’s the problem: we cannot afford to be comfortable. We cannot afford to want to keep things the way they are because the world needs to hear our message and we aren’t effectively sharing it right now. The world needs to hear the gospel from our lips and the world needs to see us actually doing the work of taking care of each other and we are not doing everything we can to make sure those things happen.
The church of 2017 looks nothing like the church of the early Jesus followers. The church has done nothing but change and reform throughout its whole history; unfortunately for us, our own memories are much shorter than that and only tend to remember back far enough that the church looks very similar to our memories. So what does it mean for us to mark an anniversary that says we have are a church ‘church reformed – always reforming’ and have been for 500 years? What might marking this anniversary call us to do? Give thanks, to be sure. But what else? It seems to me that we might find our own conviction to adapt to the needs of the changing world strengthened…
George Gillespie (1613-1648) said “reformation ends not in contemplation, but in action.” So let us not mark this anniversary with celebrations or by patting ourselves on our backs. Instead, may it be a motivator to continue the work of reformation – which is action.
Learning and growing together, with Christ,
Pastor Joanna +