(Guest blogger this week is Royce Eckhardt)

Whenever the people of faith gather in any time or place to celebrate the mighty acts of God, they invariably sing—from the OT tabernacle and temple, to the early Christians, through the Medieval monasteries, the Reformation, to this very day. St. Paul tells us that when Christians gather, they bring a lesson, a prophecy, an interpretation, a hymn (I Cor. 14:26). We sing what we believe and believe what we sing.

One who has not been in church for most of a lifetime, but who was brought up in the nurture of the church as a child will remember some hymns and songs, although everything else about church life may be forgotten.  When all the sermons, the conferences, and Bible studies had faded from memory, the hymns we have learned many, many years ago are likely still to be in our memory banks.  It goes that deep.  Faith lives in song; song nurtures faith.

The basic beliefs and doctrinal understanding of most Christians have been shaped more by the hymns they have learned than, perhaps, by the preaching they have heard or the Bible studies attended. A seminary professor recently wrote: “Music has shaped my faith in childhood songs, tunes and texts from…hymnody of every time and place…I have sung my way into faith.  The preface to the United Methodist Hymnal states, “Next to the Bible, our hymnals have been our most formative resource.

Karl Barth, the renowned Swiss theologian, stated: The praise of God [in the community]…seeks to be expressed, to well up and be sung communally.  The Christian community sings…. from inner necessity it sings.  ….The praise of God which finds its concrete culmination in the singing of the community is one of the indispensable basic forms of the ministry of the [Christian] community.

German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave us a wonderful insight into the congregational singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.  He said, “It is the voice of the church that is heard in our singing. It is not you that sings, it is the church that is singing, and you, as a member . . . may share in its song. Thus all singing together that is right must serve to widen our spiritual horizon, make us see our little company as a member of the great Christian church on earth, and help us willingly and gladly to join our singing, be it feeble or good, to the song of the church.”

Hymn singing might be one of last places in our culture where people sing together, and perhaps the only place where there is intergenerational community singing.

That’s why we sing in church—it is an important part of our spiritual formation and nurture and a most significant part of our communal Christian experience.

Royce Eckhardt

“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” — Matthew 7:12

It comes inconspicuously near the tail end of the Sermon on the Mount. Certainly it is among the most important of Jesus’ moral teachings, while at the same time a four year old can understand it.

We think about it and it makes most sense in terms of reciprocity. This is the principle that says, do good to others today so that they will do good to you in return. Reciprocity is the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit. I’ll scratch your back, and you scratch mine. Reciprocity is dealmaking with my own interest in mind. And there is nothing moral about that! This is not what Jesus means. He says so: “Even the tax collectors and Gentiles do the same” (Matthew 5:46-47). Reciprocity living only gets us as far as “an eye for an eye” way of living in relationships, and this is where revenge and retribution have chances to live and breathe.

Jesus is interested, says the Ethicist David Gushee, “In establishing for oneself a pattern of behavior ahead of and unrelated to the behavior of others. Act toward others today the way that you would want them to act toward you tomorrow.” (The Moral Teachings of Jesus, p. 96). This implies that the other may or may not respond as you hope. Jesus calls us to act irregardless of the responding behavior of the other, “to let God’s will rather then mere human reactivity set the agenda for our behavior.” (Gushee). In my mind gets at the great challenge of what it means to follow Jesus. This is hard!

Howard Thurman describes this process thus: “True spiritual freedom involves wrestling back inner control of our motivations and accepting divine direction of our behavior.” (Jesus and the Disinherited, 98-99).

Is this what Jesus has in mind for our human experiment, that in this little, simple-sounding command the retributive, violent, and death-dealing ways of the world can be changed?

I wonder what you think. Love from here!

Peter Hawkinson

“The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.” Psalm 121:8

It’s a first day for many of you, including my Bonnie. She was up and gone early for a new school season. As I left the house this morning, bear did not seem so pleased; after a summer of buzzing activity around the house, now we’re off into a new routine.

I always come back on the first day of school to memories of some worry about schoolwork (I was not a great student!) and social anxiety (can I find new friends?). And though we were not a daily devotional type of family, on the first day of school we’d gather in the living room, and dad would read Psalm 121 and remind us that God was going with us into everything new. I am thinking about how profoundly comforting such a comprehensive truth is, that in any and all of our coming and going we are never alone.

And as I sit here in my office space to begin another new week, I find myself praying for so many of you facing new seasons — some welcomed like good friends, others intrusive, and bringing uncertainty. So many new transitions right now. Retirement. A new diagnosis. Dorm drop offs and tender goodbyes. Surgical procedures, with treatments to follow. The end of treatments, finally. Job interviews. A new decade of life. Hospice care. Downsizing. Waiting for daily updates about a loved one in critical care. A new grade in a new school. Fresh grief, so deeply missing a departed partner.

There is no choice but to move forward. Life comes with new seasons and first days. They come often with some excitement and also apprehension. Mixed feelings hint at the unknown. What will happen today, this week, in the year ahead? And likely, true to our feelings, there will be some good and some hard days ahead.

God’s promise is to come along. What a blessing!

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10, NRSV)

Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn’t get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in comstant touch with my own limitations. Satan’s angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that , and then he told me, “My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.” Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations cut me down to size — abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10, The Message)

One of the many ironies of Christian faith is the call to reckon honestly and continually with our own weakness. We are told in fact that our honest assessment of our brokenness is the fertile ground for God’s grace to grow in us and through us. Make no mistake about it, ours is a faith of giving up, of letting go, of finding strength in Christ Jesus rather than trying to spend all our time and energy proving ourselves to be holy enough. This doesn’t mean we become lazy in trying to live a moral and ethical life; it’s just about where we locate our capacity to do so, and that is in the strength God’s Spirit gives us to be loving, kind, compassionate, merciful, just and righteous.

Of course, we’re fascinated by the wondering about what Paul’s thorn in the flesh, what his handicap was. An addiction maybe. Some bad relentless temptation. Certainly some deficit, some glaring weakness. The human, mortal point of course is that even St. Paul had his struggles, and so of course do you and I.

Reflecting on this sense that loving and following Jesus Christ leaves no room for pride, I wonder if Paul’s thorn in the flesh could have been his very strengths. His Charisma, his boldness, his growing fame, all contributing to his sense of self-importance. If we follow the logic, he might say that “when I am strong I am weak.” Strong, independent, self-sufficient, powerful, wealthy, successful — these are the central tenets we’re working for on our human journey. And these put our need for God’s grace on the back-burner. My wondering is if in one way or another Paul’s greatest weakness is his capacity for pride, and that he needed constantly to seek out humility which he found in his honest confession, his giving up, his giving in.

This is why we are constantly confessing our sins to God, so that we can let go, give up, give in. And always, always as we sit in our weaknesses there comes a word of mercy, of grace, of forgiveness, of God’s complete acceptance of us. And we are strengthened to begin again, with fresh experiences of being loved completely.

The way to guard yourself against selfish pride is to be honest about your own weaknesses. Every day. And then to listen for mercy, and watch for the grace of Christ to give you strength to love, to serve, to bless.

What is the handicap you have been gifted with? The thorn in the flesh that travels with you? Are you aware of and willing to share your weakness, to be vulnerable with God, who is rich in mercy and abounding in steadfast love? This is, after all, the way to find strength for life.

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

“Haven’t I commanded you? Strength! Courage! Don’t be timid; don’t get discouraged. God, your God, is with you every step you take.” Joshua 1:9, The Message

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yogi Berra

I would often call my folks when I was perplexed about what to do when a choice was at hand. Seeking the sage wisdom and advice of those farther down the road of life, of those who know and love me most, my dad would often respond in a way that I found unhelpful, and frankly, annoying at the time. He’d say one word, with emphasis: Proceed! Here I was, at a fork in life’s road, having to move in one direction or another, out of time, faced with a choice, which meant that I was looking for their help in nudging me in one direction or another. And all I got, essentially, was, “Well, go ahead then.” Proceed.

Looking back in my life, I wonder why I came to these moments, and come to them still with some sense that it’s a 50/50 proposition. That is, that if I choose rightly, if I can discern what God’s will is, and go in that direction or make that choice, all will be well, and I’ll get blessed. But if I make the wrong choice, that is not God’s will, then I will fail and in fact, find myself alone, without God’s guidance and blessing.

Theologically, we love to turn God into a cosmic being who’s just waiting for us to fail, or to fall. And God’s ways become daunting riddles, puzzles that if we can’t solve will find us abandoned for now, with a future much more bleak, referenced by lakes of fire. So we have to figure out our way through the gauntlet of life without a misstep. “Good luck, don’t mess up!” is what God seems to say.

This theology is rooted historically in the Church’s attempts to literally “scare the hell” out of people and get them to get saved, even back in crusade time with the tip of a sword at your throat. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all in on the need for new life in Christ! I know the blessings each day of the Holy Spirit work going on to transform my heart and mind, and the action of my hands and feet.

But It’s a God of love who we meet in the bible, and at the communion table. God who is so profoundly FOR us that God lives among us in Jesus form. God, who refuses to give up on “a stubborn and stiff necked people”, God of “Hesed”, steadfast love, God who IS love and always with us. So we don’t need to be cower in fear that one choice is right, and the other is wrong, and we’ll find out if we made the right one shortly. No, God goes with us, God is with us, wherever we go.

Which brings me back to “Proceed.” I realize with the years now that my folks were teaching me that God’s presence and blessing were not contingent on my choices, but that I couldn’t get away from the love of God in any direction, and that God has given me freedom to reflect and move forward.

This doesn’t mean every choice I’ve made has been a good one. Some, in reflecting back, were not the right one. But I’ve learned that even in those disappointments, especially in those sorrows, God’s love and grace have allowed me to learn and move forward. Like a loving parent, our heavenly Father loves us without qualification.

So whatever it might be that’s in front of you, decisions and directions big and small, just allow yourself to hear God say to your spirit, “Guess what. I will be with you wherever you go.” and then take Yogi’s advice: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Or call me up, and we can talk about it, and then I’ll say to you “well, proceed!” And we’ll laugh together.

Because God is good all the time. And all the time, God is good!

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

“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