“Jesus answered Pilate, “My Kingdom is not from this world”…Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “you say that I am a king.” For this I was born, and for this I came into this world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” (John 18)

“Do not be conformed to this world (greek “age”), but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

“The church is a colony, an island of one culture in the middle of another. In baptism our citizenship is transferred from one dominion to another, and we become, in whatever culture we find ourselves, resident aliens.” (Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 1989)

“We believe that the Church’s answer to the global crises of our day is, in sum, the Kingdom of God. Our working hypothesis is that the Kingdom of God is not from this world, but it is emphatically for this world.” (Wright and Bird, Jesus and the Powers, 2024)

I’m sure by now you are tiring of my favorite constant drumbeat about the Kingdom of God, and of it’s distinct difference in thought, values, and practice from from any worldly kingdom or country. I’m of the opinion this is the most important biblical/theological/Jesus truth that is being set aside anew, as it has always been when the Christian community decides it wants some of the tasty blessings that world kingdoms want to serve up. Wealth and power are always the top two.

It’s nothing new, of course. Just get to know the Jesus of the gospels. Become familiar with the forming theology of the early church. and read history. Over and over the Kingdom of God is said to be other-worldly and running contrary to what’s going on in the world, and over and over the church tries to meld them together and make them compatible, so that we can have God on our own terms. The results are disastrous — Wars, injustices of every kind fueled by hatreds of differences, exclusions galore, genocides, discriminations and slavery, corruptions always new and fresh. All of these rooted in quests for wealth and power, the very things our Lord Jesus rejected, instead offering up himself to suffer and die.

You may disagree with me — that’s allowed! But I am convinced that we are living in another fevered cultural moment, watching the Church try and meld the lines together with the political powers that be. A movement is afoot and there is great energy fueling the attempt to make our nation a “Christian” nation, but our underlying motives as the Church are anything but Christian. We are seeking after wealth and power, our old shadow companions while trying to hide our ulterior self-centered motives.

Instead, we are called to put our energy into being the Church in and for the culture. Our focus is on and in the Kingdom of God, and if we focus there it is clear that our values and practices are different because the Kingdom of God choose central values of love and mercy rather than wealth and power. We find wealth in good deeds, we are a servant people. The question of wealth, of resources, is most focused on the needs of the most vulnerable, and with the suffering and poor in mind our first impulse is not to hoard resources but share them. Love, the Kingdom of God’s core driving force, finds us tending toward including rather than excluding others. And what is just and right demands of us an honest assessment over and over again of our tendency to wander off into the allurements that wealth and power tempt us with, and to repent, to seek first the Kingdom of God instead. And all this, we believe, IS the answer to the brokenness of the world’s ways.

What I’m pleading for is for us to remember and re-commit ourselves again and again to being resident aliens in this world as those who belong to Christ and his Kingdom. As the Hebrew writer says of the ancients, “They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.” (Hebrews 11:13-14).

It’s not he job of the world around us (and especially its systems of power) to act in ways that reflect the values of the Kingdom of God. History teaches us that this will never happen! Rather, we find hope in God’s Coming Kingdom, coming through us into our world — to bring us closer to that idea God has of neighbor love that is transformational. And to resist, with the Spirit’s help, the temptations ever-before us to cozy up to empire for our own comfort and benefit.

We are resident aliens. Let’s remember that! And let’s get on with the work of God’s Kingdom.

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

This photo haunts me. I see it in my dreams. Here we have the late Pope Francis, the direct successor to St. Peter himself, who is busy and hard at work offering his homily. The background to the picture is that this little girl escaped the arms of her parent just in time to run up and sit down here. While her parents were horrified at her action, the pope simply kept going with his gospel while he reached back to hold her hand, while he nodded at his security guards to stay away.

We all know the familiar story about Jesus and the children. Parents with their infants and toddlers are coming out into the wilderness to find Jesus, wanting him to touch and bless their children. The disciples lock up their arms to make a barrier while they shout out that he’s just too busy with moire important things, and just too tired. When Jesus hears them, and sees what they’re doing he becomes angry with them, irate is the way The Message says it. Speak-shouting, Jesus says, “Don’t ever get between them and me. These children are at the very center of life in the Kingdom. Mark this: unless you accept God’s kingdom in the simplicity of a child, you’ll never get in.” Then, gathering the children up in his arms, he laid his hands of blessing on them.” (Mark 10:13-16, The Message).

Humility, it seems, is a prerequisite for our new life in Christ, who goes on to say that “I am gentle and humble in heart“. (Matthew 11:29).

The challenge to this is our human, cultural, and worldly way of being very much in touch with the power we have over each other. We become arrogant and rude, dismissive and turn away the interruptions that invade our importance, as if to say, “Don’t you recognize who I am?” “Don’t you see how inappropriate it is for you to approach someone as important as me?” The beauty of little children is that they don’t see or sense those barriers, but just see another adult loving man whose hand they want to hold. We might say they are ignorant, or naive: Jesus says they are the true and pure representatives of God’s Kingdom.

And Jesus teaches over and over about humility. It’s his second most popular sermon theme, only behind money and possessions. He implores his friends to become like little children. In this word is a call to our own humility, to lose our own sense of importance when another human being comes calling. To give up your seat in the front and give it to someone else. To invite others to your party who who never expect it. To stop seeing another person, any person as less important or valued than you, and begin serving them as more important in the end.

Pope Francis modeled this humility from the moment he was elevated to be Pope. On his first appearance to the masses down in the square, he appeared not in the special garb that sets the Pope apart, but in the clothing of an ordinary parish priest — a simple white cassock and vestments, a simple iron cross instead of an ornate one, a modest silver ring rather than the gold fisherman’s ring, black shoes instead of red velvet ones. His message to the throngs was not to make a special trip to try and see him, but rather make a special effort to serve the poor right where you live.

So when this holy moment in the picture came, he didn’t need to stop and consider how he might show humility. No, he already had taken on the New Life in Christ, and so become one who is gentle and humble in heart like Jesus.

In a time when the church in our own culture seems to be growing more angry and entitled, I need to somehow enlarge the picture enough to get it framed and up on my wall!

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

All over the gospels, there’s a common occurrence, when Jesus, who claims to be the Messiah, is eating and having fellowship with “sinners” – and there’s Grumbling. Grumbling. And Jesus is trying to get the religious folk to understand the grace of God, and that it’s only by grace that they can find life with God, and that by grace they CAN find life with God!

In our early Covenant Church days, there was a man in 1871 identified only as “L. Peterson from Princeton, IL”, who ruminated on this gospel moment that comes frequently in a letter to a friend, as they were considering grace together. The letter ends with this prayer:

                         May God,

from whom all grace comes,

fill our dead, cold, lukewarm,

empty, narrow, sluggish,

careless, false, hypocritical,

unfaithful, doubting, frivolous,

erring, godless, corrupted,

dispirited, depressed, sorrowful,

GLAD hearts.       

I’m struck by that prayer, how it seems celebrative and hopeful, even though it contains an exhaustive and exhausting list of confessed sins. Guilty as charged! Honest to the hilt! Yet gladness remains, a glad heart, only because of grace, and the activity of the God from whom all grace comes. I have experienced it in others, and myself have struggled mightily with the nature of grace, that it can only be accepted, never earned, that it can only be received through an honest confession of utter underserving, and that it is precisely this honest confession that makes grace understood and thus gladden the heart.

I knew another old man a hundred years later in 1971. I’d watch Milton during the weekly time of congregational confession for an obvious reason, because the same thing happened every week: he’d lay his head down on the pew in front of him, hands folded above him, often with tears, as if in agony, and then raise himself up just in time to hear the pastor’s words of assurance – “In Jesus Christ, your sins are forgiven” – suddenly smiling broadly as if to someone up in the rafters, taking a deep, deep breath. Just like that, every week.

Honesty, I think, gets a bad rap, especially when it comes to being honest with God – God is, after all slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and more than anything else, filled with grace. As my maternal grandmother used to say, “Sometimes a good cry is the best thing!” So consider a brutal honesty before God as the way to a Glad heart.

All Thanks be to God!

Peter Hawkinson

Last year, I started a new program for a summer adult formation offering: Movies That Matter.

I thought that I would try a bit of an experiment, acknowledging the challenges of summer programming (when people are often here one week and gone the next) and offer something that people could drop in at if they found themselves in town that night, eat some popcorn, feel like a kid again with a box of Raisinets, and learn about an important social issue of our time.

I also hoped, if I am honest, that through these movies and the conversations after them, that I could get people to care about some of these issues, especially ones that seemed really far removed from our daily lives.

I thought that if we talked about black maternal health, and the persecution experienced by fat people, and the plight of Palestinian freedom fighters and also Israeli soldiers then perhaps these conversations would no longer be about “us” and “them,” but that we could come to see ourselves in “them.” That these movies would make people and their stories immediate and personal and real to us.

That, in the words of Father Gregory Boyle, the demonizing of groups of people who are different from us would stop. That we would come to realize “there is no us and them, just us.” That the doorway would be opened for connection, for communion. For what he calls kinship. “An exquisite mutuality.”

I admit this is a lot to hope for in a movie series. But hope I did. And hope I still am.

Tomorrow night, we have another chance to make these kinds of connections.

Thanks to the decision of our Executive Board and the use of memorial funds, we have an incredible opportunity to see a movie that collapses the distance between “us” in the United States and the immigrants desperately seeking a new life here. The film, “All We Carry,” is a 2024 release that is not yet publicly distributed. And thanks to the generosity of our church, we will not only show this movie, but also speak afterwards on Zoom with the director Cady Voge.

This movie tells the story of a family fleeing persecution in their native Honduras and seeking asylum in the United States. It follows their journey, including time spent in immigration detention, and how they were adopted by a Jewish community in Seattle that supported them through the asylum process. It honors their incredible strength in the face of enormous challenges, and it also brings faces and names to a conversation that dominates our news cycle but often in vague, dehumanizing, and denigrating terms.

Regardless of what you believe about immigration and the United States, whether you support or lament the actions being taken right now by immigration authorities, I encourage you to come. Come ready to learn something new, to listen, to ask questions, and (I hope) to discover what Greg Boyle says we already know: “separation is an illusion. We belong to each other.”

More information can be found here (or contact me!)

-Pastor Jen

“They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” (John 17:16)

“For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

And so once again in our national context we come to Independence Day. We remember our beginnings and celebrate the bravery of those who stood against tyranny with an eye on freedom from King George and British rule. We mark still our fierce independence. There are always challenges to it, from one year to the next. This year is no different.

Wondering always comes to me: How do we come to this celebration of Independence as a Christian community deeply rooted and formed in the opposite, in dependence? Freedom as we come to it comes only from God’s grace and mercy. We know well that when we try, whether individually or collectively, to take over control of things, bad things happen. The scripture constantly calls us back to our utter dependence on God for life, for strength and wisdom, for hope, and yes, for freedom to live a new life.

The reminder I think is that as Christians we experience life in two different worlds. While we live in our human moment in a particular time, and country, and moment in history, at the same time we have rooted our lives in the Kingdom of God, which proclaims a different reality, an alternative view of what human flourishing looks like, a different set of moral and ethical realities all rooted in love, and which operates in complete dependence on God.

It’s important. As we gather and remember and renew our commitment as Americans to our independence and say “let freedom ring”, that we do so with one foot also and even more so in God’s Kingdom, where we locate our true home and hopes we have for this world and the next.

As we pray it,

Hallowed be your name. May your Kingdom come, and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson