I have a big hard cover book that says “Pastoral Record” on the outside. Inside are lists of my pastorates, and of all the baptisms, confirmation classes and church members, marriages, funerals, and sermons delivered. The first entry is January 9, 1994 when I began to serve Campus Way Covenant Church in Federal Way, Washington. The last is last Sunday, the 1,384th sermon I have preached. There are through the years 153 baptisms, 356 new members (Don and Kass Anderson, you are 357 and 358! ), 169 confirmands, 68 weddings, and 204 funerals. 30 years– where does the time go?

On April 1, 2001 our life journeys reunited! After years of youth ministry 1988-1992, followed by eight years of happy years in Seattle and South Minneapolis, Bonnie and I returned, this time with three little girls, and our great joy has been sharing the last 23 years with you.

What I’m reflecting on and nostalgic about is the blessing of the years, and particularly the journey we’ve shared through all the ups and downs that have come. We really have been together, and shared our lives.

I just want to say what my grandmother said in her last human moments: Thanks for Everything! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not imminently leaving this life, at least as far as I know, but I’m reflecting on the years, and the journey like Lydia was, and I’m deeply, profoundly grateful.

Being a hymn geek as you know I am, I woke up this morning humming “Thanks to God For my Redeemer” (Hymnal 657, I know that without looking!) — and now I know why, because the Lord woke me up with a thankful heart this morning, and the rain overnight has gone, and the warm sun is shining again, and I am just know reflecting on time and togetherness with you.

So if you’ll forgive me, here’s one more verse:

Thanks to God for my Church family, thanks for years on top of years,

Thanks for time to spend together, full of joy and also tears!

Thanks for grace and mercy roaming through our lives, gifts from above,

Thanks for friends who live together, acting out your steadfast love!

Peter Hawkinson

Last night was the deacon meeting and today I’m getting the itch to start a jigsaw puzzle. So its no mystery why I’ve got 1 Timothy 3:9 on my mind: “They (deacons) must hold fast to the mystery of their faith with a clear conscience.” Don’t worry you deacons! It’s all good! Let me explain.

I’m focused on all of us and this image of “holding fast to the mystery of our faith”. And as I look at the puzzle picture and begin to siphon off the edge/frame pieces, I’m thinking about the life of a faith as a process, much like putting a puzzle together.

Here’s what I mean: this puzzle last year got crumbled up when only partly finished. Oh, I love the multi-colored pieces and parts, and in this case, there are 16 hot air balloons of various sizes, floating through the air. Putting those together comes quickly! But then there is a great big clear blue sky, fully a third of the puzzle, that offers no help with colors. It takes time. It’s meticulously hard to stick with it, because construction slows to a slog. If you are a puzzle person you know exactly what I mean! Last winter I gave up! This fall I’m going to stick with it, I promise!

And I think that this process is a lot like my life-long journey of faith. As time grows on and I grow older, and I’ve spent many years excitedly putting faith’s borders and colorful pieces together, what’s left now is the big blue sky. The blue sky is represented by the word “MYSTERY”, which used to be a central word for Christian pilgrims. Then the Enlightenment came in the 18th century, and Christian faith moved from heart to head spaces, and we intellectuals became quickly uncomfortable with Faith as a mystery, that is, that we understand some bits and pieces but in fact have much more to work on (the big blue sky) that we don’t understand about God and God’s Kingdom.

Getting here, I have a couple clear choices. If I’m not willing to slow down and work hard and even sometimes feel like I’m not making progress, I can give up on the fuller picture when I get to the hard part, the blue sky, pack it up and be glad for how far I got. OR, I can accept that I need to slow down to be able to wrestle with the harder, deeper issues and questions, and even that it might take me the rest of the fall — or the rest of my life — to get the whole picture. It might be helpful to ask for some help with the blue sky part, to find other family or friends to work on it with me. To wrestle with mysteries together is much more fun than to try and do that hard work alone.

Paul’s advice to Timothy — a young whippersnapper pastor — is to keep at it when you get to the harder part, the slower part, the deeper part, the blue sky part of the life of faith. “Hold fast” he says. Accept it as a way of life, of journeying, rather than be just so worried about getting it all figured out. I remember my rabbi friends in South Minneapolis, who fascinated me with their way of reading scripture. Their goal was to ask the good and right questions rather than to feel obligated to figure out all the answers. And it opened up a whole new world for me. A whole new, big, blue sky world, where there is time and space to contemplate deep mysteries that are beyond any answers we can offer.

Our faith is a mystery, after all. And that’s ok. We know and we don’t know. That’s the truth, isn’t it?

Have you gotten there to the big blue sky part yet? Will you slow down and keep going?

Love From Here

Peter

On a walk a few days ago, I began to notice a few first glimpses of fall– a season that, much like spring, brings new opportunities, invitations, and beginnings. The changing of the seasons often serve as a reminder to me that God is indeed on the move and that we should take notice. God was indeed on the move in my life about a year ago, as last fall, I was fortunate enough to be able to take a transformative trip with the North Park Theological Seminary to France– first to Paris and then to the worshiping community of Taize.

Taize is a Christian community which was founded in the French countryside during the second world war, by Brother Roger of Taize. Since the community’s founding, the brothers at Taize & the community they’ve built have become known for 1) their music: they write short, repetitive worship melodies in a variety of languages. A very popular one, Wait For the Lord, is in our Covenant Hymnal (there may well be others!). 2) Their retreat space: much like our beloved Covenant camps, Taize primarily draws young people from all across Europe (and rest of the world) to come and experience God in a set apart worship & fellowship space. 3) Their emphasis on ecumenism and unity.

My time at Taize was personally transformative– I loved singing praises together with hundreds of others three times a day in their morning, midday, and evening worship, but it was their emphasis on ecumenism, unity, and reconciliation that has stuck with me. Taize is a monastic community run by Catholic brothers who have devoted their lives to the work and community life there. Yet, it is intentionally inclusive of other Christian groups, especially Protestants, and has been since the community’s formation. No part of the Taize experience was as meaningful to me as breaking my fast with Communion each day. I, a Protestant, was served Communion by one of the Catholic brothers which I then received and ate alongside hundreds of Catholics, Protestants, and others alike. This may be the only time on this side of heaven that I am able to participate in this sacrament with my Catholic brothers, sisters, and siblings. This experience filled me with much gratitude, but also immense sadness.

About a month from today, it will be Reformation Day, a day we remember Martin Luther nailing 95 theses to church doors in Wittenberg, Germany. Reformation Day (October 31) and Reformation Sunday (October 27) are days that also fill me with much gratitude, but also immense sadness. Reformation is a wonderful thing of course. It’s something God is constantly doing in each of us and in our world, and so, of course the Church must too be open to reformation and renewal. Reformation was desperately needed in the 1500s when Luther nailed his theses to the door, doing so mainly in protest of the Church’s practice of selling indulgences. But we must remember too, that it has tragically divided us from our Catholic brothers, sisters, and siblings in Christ. Luther’s intention was not to start a new, separate, and splintered church, but that is what happened.

Winnetka Covenant’s main emphases on Reformation Sunday are to recognize that our denomination was born out of this reformation & to remind us that we all, in our day and age, must be Church reformers also & open to God’s re-forming of us. Many Christians are noticing that big reformation in the Church seems to come every 500 years or so, meaning, according to some, we are in our own reformation period right now. To many of us this is no surprise, after all, in Adult Sunday School we are currently discussing what it means to be the church in our present time, how to care for the ever-growing number of religious nones, dones, and folks who are deconstructing, all the while being people who are seeking to reconstruct faiths and churches that are healthier, stronger, yet less rigid, and more inclusive.

I pray that as we here at Winnetka Covenant, and all of us wherever we are, seek to be re-formers of our faiths and our Church, that we would follow the wonderful example set for us by the brothers at Taize. Over the course of the community’s history, they have come under serious fire for serving communion to Protestants, yet, on they serve, not because they’re throwing out their Catholic identity, but simply because they recognize their ministry is an ecumenical one and unity and reconciliation are the center of who they are in Christ. What a shining beacon of hope, that perhaps our re-forming of things doesn’t always have to divide us as it has in the past, but that reformation could actually move us toward each other, toward including one another and uniting together, especially with those from whom we are different.

In conclusion, read these 60 year old journal entries from Brother Roger of Taize:
“Some Italian priests from Siena asked me the question: if you had the power (they said: if you were pope), what would you do at once for unity? My answer: let all baptized persons who believe in the real presence receive communion; and secondly, pay great attention to non-believers, open the doors.”

“The call to reconciliation is a language accessible to all. But if we remain with an ecumenism of words, of dialogue, of harmony, of peaceful coexistence, we settle into the inertia of a denominational truce. Some theologians of ecumenism speak of an ‘eschatological’ ecumenism. If dialogue leads to this conclusion, it was not worthwhile: that would be an ecumenism without hope.”

Friends, let us be people with hope. Let us be reformers with unity as our goal, not division.

With hope and love,
Pastor Lynnea

This phrase, meaning “in the middle of things” in Latin, is often used in literature to describe stories that start mid-plot, which aligns with the idea of being “born into the middle of a story.”

I’m fascinated with this idea, that we, you and I, are born into the middle of a story. Someone in my past used that phrase all the time — and how hilarious and scary that just now my sixty year old brain can’t track that person down. Nevertheless, reflection about this has always captivated me. Though I entered this world in a particular holy moment, there were circumstances and experiences in my Hawkinson and Larson families that shaped very much where I was born, and when, and the house and family I went home to. Emigration and immigration journeys, war experiences, faith stories, education chances and job switches. Pacemakers and leaky heart valves, old pandemics and polio. Birth order, chance meetings and blind dates, dreams and joys and tragedies and family secrets too. And that’s just scratching the surface!

We are born into the middle of a story which we learn about our whole lives, and which we in turn shape and mold further in both good and hard ways until we leave the scene. In this sense, we who are alive miss a lot of life’s marrow if we don’t look back and contemplate both the gifts and burdens that we pick up and hold and live with and through. It’s fascinating to think that a certain family moment I’m thinking about just now that took place 140 years ago on the other side of the world directly affects how I think about myself, and others too. I’d love to tell you more about it sometime.

In between hospital and home visits, I’m writing this blog in a Panera restaurant, and looking across the room I see about 15 other souls from a toddler to an elderly woman tenderly helping her spouse with Parkinson’s disease enjoy his soup. What stories do they have to tell? What’s the middle saga they were born into? How have they shaped that story through their life?

For now, I’m asking you to turn off the tv, and turn on your holy story. Every human journey is a sacred journey. What story have you been given? What realities were you born into? What more are you learning as you grow older? If you were a movie scriptwriter, what would be the 4 or 5 scenes leading up to your birth?

And then, looking forward, what are your hopes for how you can shape that story while you have the chance? What dreams do you dream for your family members born a century from now?

In Media Res. Here we are, in the middle of things. What a sacred privilege!

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

The Benedictine sister, theologian, and social activist Joan Chittister tells it like it is, or maybe even more like it needs to be. Someone put her book The Time is Now: A Call to Uncommon Courage in my hands, or rather on my widow sill during our pandemic isolation. It’s been sitting nearby, and I’m just now reading through it devotionally. It’s a great companion voice to that of James, who is engaging our worship life these days.

Her first chapter goes under the heading of Risk. Here she contemplates what it means to live a spiritual life, and finds unfortunate our distinction often made between an inward, personal spirituality and an outward socially active spirituality. Of this she says “To follow Jesus in a world on the brink of disaster — nuclearism, world hunger, egregious greed, civil breakdown, racial slavery, sexism, and planetary ruin, I began to understand– is surely about something greater than the development of regular spiritual routines or being a “Good Christian….the question “What will you do?” Is at the core of spiritual maturity, of spiritual commitment. To follow Jesus means that we, too, must do something to redeem our battered, beaten world from the greed that smothers it…in fact, we often ignore, resist, reject the idea that like Jesus, we have a role to play in righting a world whose axle is tilting in the wrong direction…Christianity requires that we each be such a prophetic presence that our corner of the world becomes a better place because we have been there…none of us has the right to quit until God’s will for the world is accomplished.” (p.23-32)

The Talmud, which is a compilation of ancient Jewish thought and contains centuries of rabbinical teachings. Of risk it teaches that “There is risk in every life. Those who risk nothing risk much more.” I’m thinking about so many of Jesus’s hard sayings, that seem to come in every gospel lesson week by week: “Find your live by losing it”, “The last will be first, and the first last”, “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me”, and on this sunday to come, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

In one way or another, it seems to all come down to the same thing, the same invitation, the same call, the same risky command — and that is to give up myself, to offer up my life, to put others first. In terms of the way the world works, it’s a risk not worth taking to be sure. But from the perspective of God’s Kingdom, it is in fact the very move that promises to bind up the world’s wounds. Jesus plays show and tell. His invitations bear a mighty integrity because his life bears witness. He said to his disciples one day, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and after being killed, he will rise again.” Hard to hear, but ends really well in new life after all.

Just think for a moment about what this posture of self-giving, of self-sacrifice could do to set the world right! I know, I know, it’s so utopian! Nevertheless, for us as Christians, it is to be our worldview, and call to arms, weaponizing love.

How am I, how are you, how are we together doing with the risk of all this following Jesus business?

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

“He (an angel) said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.” (1 Kings 19)

Yesterday I kept vigil with you. It was September 11, and together we grieve the terror of 23 years ago. I took time in the morning to follow the events going on at ground zero, and at the pentagon building, and in a farm field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Bells were being rung at the exact moments in the morning that the events took place, and so news coverage would suddenly stop when those moments came…8:46, north tower hit, 9:03 south tower hit, 9:37 pentagon, 10:03 flight 93 crashes….

What I noticed is the silence’s power. The news reporter in the middle of some other conversation said repeatedly, “Excuse me, but let’s tune in and listen to the silence…” and then at each moment a bell, and then silence, long extended silence before the recalling of the names would begin again. Likely you saw or have seen this through the years, and we have many “Join me for a moment of silence”, especially when remembering those who’ve died. Those silences are powerful because they locate our collective grief. For a moment, we are unified, and silent, and it is as though the silence speaks, we can listen to it. It’s better than any words we can find.

It brings me back to that day when Elijah (scared to death and hiding in a wilderness cave) gets a holy messenger sent to reassure him that God is near, in fact, is passing by, and that he best get himself up mount Horeb, where wind, earthquake, and fire appear, all former links to God’s appearing. But then there is “a sound of sheer silence”. And Elijah “hears it”. What does sheer silence sound like?

Somehow in the silence the prophet is reassured. And sometimes, especially when the moment is one in which any words come up short, it’s best to just be still (Ps 46), to be silent, and to listen to what the silence has to say. Maybe now, because of our modern sound-byte saturated lives, we need sheer silence more than ever! You may have noticed that recently we have been allowing silence to be a line in our worship liturgy. It’s uncomfortable, I know!

Somehow silence is not at all the absence of sound but the presence of deeper meaning. We need to work on hearing the silence more often. God, it seems, is found there.

Love From Here

Peter Hawkinson

This blogpost is dedicated to those 2,996 human beings who died on September 11, 2001, and and their loved ones. As people of faith may we always be seeking peace and pursuing it. (Psalm 34).

“Jesus Wept.” (John 11:35)

It has stayed on the left edge of my desk, always in eyesight just over the top of my laptop computer. It’s a tree of copper wire and green pencil erasers rooted around a stone, created by Rev. Kari Lindholm Johnson, who seven years ago now came and shared a month with us, teaching us with love and passion about our connection to God. “We might be, we could become like that tree planted by streams of water” Kari reflected, as we read Psalm 1 together. “We might become, we could become like a fragrant fruit-bearing tree” Kari reflected, as we read the Gospel of Jesus together. Then vine and branches, and finally, as we grow old with the Spirit’s help we can grow tall, and wide like a mighty oak tree to give shade and home. It was a blessed time of dreaming together.

Well, Kari died earlier this summer after a quick and mighty struggle with cancer that cut her life short at 60 years. At least that’s what it feels like, still, when I look at that wire tree she made while she was teaching us. I’m finding my grief growing, and staying, putting down roots like those I’m looking at wrapped around the stone, seemingly choking it.

I know, I know, “we grieve but not as others do who have no hope.” (1 Thessalonians 4). I know, and I do believe that “weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Psalm 30). I know that Jesus weeps in John’s 11th chapter because his friend Lazarus is dead, but then calls him to come out alive, and he does. I believe that this weeping Jesus is in fact resurrection and life. I have faith. I keep faith.

But that doesn’t mean that grief goes away, or that it’s just a brief problem to be worked through and done with. No, the truth is that grief stays, and even grows, for all the sorrows that come with the years, and the nature of the human journey. And I’m trying to learn to let that grief just stay, without expecting it to be over soon, and surprisingly even see it as a continuing part of life’s most beautiful journey of loving and being loved. My heart aches because of love, and in this sense I experience love for Kari (and the sacred memory of those sabbath mornings together) still as I allow myself to miss her and grieve her life’s loss.

Is it possible to believe deeply that the best is yet to be — that Kari is in a better place and that I’ll see her again in some bright shining glory someday — and at the same time feel a growing grief for her distance and absence? Can they co-exist for now?

My point, I guess, is that whether it’s right or not, they do. Grief comes, and stays.

Peter Hawkinson

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:105, NRSV)

“By your words I see where I’m going; they throw a beam of light on my dark path.” (The Message)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ijbp74JOuT8595jEarE3NDTpfwGBMhHU0bO0GwMkr2E/edit?usp=sharing

Above these words is a link to a sign up list for reading the scripture on Sunday mornings. Though we may not often think so, this is our central moment in worship, as we gather to hear the scripture with an understanding that these words of life come connected to God’s Spirit in a special way!

If you sign up for a Sunday, I will be in touch with you, sending the readings along, and also the worship order, giving you time to read through the words and become familiar with their cadence and meaning.

It’s said of the early Covenanters that “they gathered around God’s Word as though it was a warm campfire on a cold winter’s night”. They were called “readers”, and it is said of them that “they did not come to the Bible because they had been convinced by theological and dogmatic discussions of its inerrancy or infallibility. They came, and continued to come, because they had found life and inspiration for themselves. They knew that speaking about food could not satisfy hunger and that speaking about thirst could not quench thirst.”

The invitations are two: First, to come hungry and thirsty for the Word of life, and second, to sign up to be a reader and help us hear it.

God bless us one and all

Peter Hawkinson

Quotes are from Images in Covenant Beginnings by Eric Hawkinson, p. 109.