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

“There is no animal welfare without human welfare.”

When I adopted Zoe in the fall of 2018, I had no idea what I was getting myself into – in a myriad of ways.

In truth, I had some hesitation about adopting her because I’d never had a dog before, and from what I could tell she was less “beginner level” than “intermediate.” When I met her at the shelter, the staff had her in a large outdoor kennel far away from all the other dogs, where she was pacing, barking and looking generally ferocious. That’s her kennel, they explained to me, because she can’t get along with other dogs.

But when they pulled her out of the kennel, I learned my first important lesson about animal rescue: the dog you see in their kennel is never the dog you take home.

That environment is so stressful that animals do whatever they can to cope. In Zoe’s case, that meant barking and pacing and not eating because she was too upset. In the shelter manager’s arms, however, she melted into a little puddle.

After several visits, lots of thinking, submitting an application and then backing out again, I brought Zoe home. I can say now it was the best decision I’ve ever made.

The next few months were a whirlwind of learning how to be a dog mom, how to crate-train and potty-train and get her to walk on a leash and cope with apartment life. I was in over my head as often as not, but there was no greater reward than seeing her fall asleep on the couch next to me, for once utterly at peace.

What I didn’t know at the time was that we were about to take a whole other journey together, because Zoe is a pitbull-type dog.

I say pitbull-type, because truthfully that is an umbrella term that has come to describe a whole host of dogs simply by physical characteristics, such as a barrel chest, a short coat, and heart-shaped head. As Bronwen Dickey writes in her wonderful book Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon, many mixed-breed dogs identified as “pit mixes” actually have no genetic identification with the four recognized breeds that are true pit bulls (American pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, Staffordshire bull terriers, and American bullies).

And unfortunately, just as there is a lot of murkiness around being able to properly identify these breeds, there is even more misinformation about their temperaments and characteristics.

Throughout her book, Bronwen describes how pitbull-type dogs went from being widely popular at the start of the 20^th century, acclaimed as friendly, family dogs, “good-natured, brave, resilient, and dependable” to vilified just a few decades later as super-predators and monsters, lock-jawed killing machines who were bred to fight. These dogs are mistreated, misunderstood, and marginalized in ways that few other breeds ever come close to.

I encourage you to read this book. Not just because I have a vested interest as a pitbull mom (yes, we did Zoe’s DNA and she turned out to be over 60% American pitbull terrier), but because in the book Bronwen makes the best argument I have seen yet for how the horrible public image of the pitbull over the last forty years has direct connections to poverty, violence, racism, and a general failure to care well for humans so they can care well for animals.

Next week, we will begin our summer movie series, Movies that Matter, with a movie that takes a hard look at this relationship between animal mistreatment and that of humans; animal welfare and human welfare, particularly as it relates to pitbulls.

The movie tells the story of Rebecca Cory, a woman who suffered domestic abuse during her childhood as did her family’s dog Jones, and who has grown up to identify closely with the plight of pitbulls and to even found the organization Stand Up For Pits to help advocate for them.

We will watch this movie at church, as part of a church program, because I also believe that it has direct connections to our faith.

When God gave the Israelites laws in the Old Testament to structure their society, to make it distinct and set apart from other ancient cultures, God was clear: they would respect human and animal life.

If someone saw their neighbor’s animal wandering away, they were to bring it back. If they saw an animal fallen in the road, they were to help it up. Animals were not to be slaughtered on the same day as their young, nor were they to be overburdened or exploited.

The sabbath day was instituted as a day of rest both for people and for animals.

I could go on, but this much seems clear: God cares about people and about animals. God expects us to treat both with dignity and compassion and care.

And so this conversation, which is about people and about pitbulls, is about our failure to live up to that.

But it also about resilience and hope, about the animals who transcend all the terrible things that happen to them, about the humans who are working to care well for people and for their animals, and for all of those reasons I really, really hope you come.

Yours,

Pastor Jen

Learn more about the movie “Saving Jones” and the Stand Up For Pits Foundation here: https://standupforpits.us/

Purchase “Pit Bull: Battle Over an American Icon” here: https://www.bronwendickey.com/book-1

Mark your calendar for Wednesday, June 18^th at 6 PM and join us in the Youth Room for this screening!