Winter Solstice

“So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
(from “The Shortest Day” a poem by Susan Cooper)

As I consider Susan Cooper’s poem and the illustrations of Carson Ellis that picture her thoughts, I am drawn to the description of Winter Solstice being the day that the year dies. Our modern sense of the death of the year is mostly something we associate with the calendar and clock and the coming and going of December 31st.  We celebrate it with a maudlin song (Auld Lang Syne) that is sung while under the influence of fermented beverages.  The death march of the Grim Reaper and birth of the infant wearing a sash emblazed with the number of the new year are both experienced within the span of a few seconds. Yet dying and birth are seldom quick experiences.  Both can be quite laborious.  Thus the encroaching darkness that foreshadows the Winter Solstice and the breaking dawn that forecasts the Summer Solstice, the  gradual going and the coming of light, speak more accurately to me about the experience of the death of one year and the birth of another.

If ever there was a year of which it can be said that I am anxiously awaiting its death, it would be 2020.  To paraphrase the Psalmist, this year has “sated my soul” with the “scorn of those who are at ease” and the “contempt of the proud” (Psalm 123).  We have clearly had more than enough of the arrogance and rancor surrounding electoral politics and the management of a world pandemic.  It would be nice if it would pass quickly at midnight December 31st and move into oblivion as we wake up on January 1, 2021.  But we all know that won’t happen.  The move into darkness and the coming of the dawn are more gradual than that.  And what gets us through the wait is something called hope.

Hope in this context is not merely a wish for things to get better.  It is the confidence that the darkness will not have the last word.  Hope is living in the confidence of the dawn.  And the dawn is something that God brings about in a span of time that we do not control.  Hope is what is behind the Advent Wreath.  It is that almost foolish expectation of the coming of light as we watch the sun skirt the edge of the horizon and give us less and less light.  Each week as we move toward the day where the year dies, we light an additional candle.  At the end of the observance we have short, dark days and five dimly burning wicks that give witness to the truth that darkness cannot extinguish the dawn of God’s light.

Advent turns encroaching darkness into an invitation to hope.So light a candle. Look toward the now dark horizon, and live into the expectation of the dawn of God’s light.

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1:78-79

David Rohrer
11/12/2020

Grief

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
Matthew 5:4

Last week I used this space to write about anger.  This week I want to take a look at its relative: Grief.  The two usually dwell near each other.  Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross noticed this connection and identified anger as one of the five stages grief.  Grief is our response to loss.  Anger is one of the ways we express that grief. Our loss occasions the reactive, adrenalin-soaked reflex of anger.  Yet when that adrenalin dissipates, and if we have not done permanent damage because of that reflex, we usually return to the quieter, persistent, energy sucking, dull ache of grief.  Here we meditate on what is gone and is probably not coming back.  Here we let go of something.  Here we make decisions about whether we want to get up and keep living. 

In some ways, anger is a diversion from the hard work of grief.  I think Psalm 137 is one of the best examples of this dynamic.  It is a prayer that moves easily between the dull ache and the rage that can characterize our loss.  By the waters of Babylon, the Psalmist weeps over the loss of home, the loss of the familiar moorings that used to bring comfort. The walls of Jerusalem have fallen, the temple has been destroyed and now in exile in Babylon the psalmist contemplates his loss.  His new neighbors are asking some questions about his old home. They want to hear some of the songs he knows.  But the grief is too deep for him to even attempt to carry one of those tunes. Songs have the power to make us cry.  And even the distant memory of these songs brings him to tears.  So he refuses to sing and the fire of rage starts to well up within him.

“How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”  Don’t treat me like a fixture of some interesting far off culture that no longer exists.  You took away my ability to sing when you tore down the place where I do my singing.  So no, I won’t sing one of our songs for you.  In fact, “Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.”  And then he prays, “Remember, O Lord….”  Remember how they tore down our walls. Remember their acts of destruction.  I hate them because they deserve to be hated.  “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us.  Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock.”

More often than not when Psalm 137 is read publicly, this last bit is left out.  In fact, even the common lectionary chooses not to include it.  Its seething rage and venom-filled longing for retribution and reprisal is embarrassing.  Reasonable people don’t say such things.  So if we feel it, God help us not to act on it.  God help us to take the path of the Psalmist in Psalm 4 who chooses to step back from acting on his wrath.  But we do feel it.  And we are fools if we do not own it.  For the attempt to keep this anger a secret from ourselves and others is futile.  As James Loder used to say: “the secret secretes.”  It will ooze out somewhere, and God help us if that shows itself only in violent acts that we believe to be expressions of righteous indignation. 

I take some solace in the fact that in response to the waywardness of the religious systems of Jerusalem, Jesus both angrily turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple and quietly wept as he pondered the tragedy of sheep who had walked away from their shepherd. The one who asked us to consider the lilies had some trouble considering them.  But he also showed us how to step back and weep.  He showed us the power of lament.  This man of sorrows was acquainted with grief.  He took up the freedom of allowing himself to sit with that grief. 

It is a mystery as to how this happens, but there is healing power in the broken heart of God.  Allowing ourselves to feel the pain of those things that break the heart of God and crying out to God in lament because of those things is something that opens us to comfort and healing.  Those who mourn are blessed because they find comfort in something other than their perceived solution to a wrong they have suffered.  They find comfort in the one who made them for himself and in a love that will never let them go.     

David Rohrer
10/24/2020

Anger

“I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!”
Saint Paul – Galatians 5:12

You probably won’t find the above quotation on one of the pages of a Biblical “thought for the day” desk calendar or printed on a “precious promise” bookmark.   Saint Paul was obviously very angry when he said it.  He was watching those whom he loved succumb to something that would not benefit them. He no doubt felt like his good work among them was being undone by the bad advice they were receiving.  And he was mad.   The issue that provided the heat for his steam was whether or not a Gentile needed to become a practicing Jew in order to fully follow Jesus. Circumcision was being touted as the sign of being “all in” and Paul would have none of the attempt to convince Gentile followers of Jesus to undergo the procedure as proof of dedicated discipleship.

Anger is an emotion that is familiar to all of us.  Yet as often as we feel it, why aren’t we more open to admitting we are experiencing it and more comfortable with the work of trying to get to the roots of it.  The great tragedy is that we are much better at denying it or justifying it or suppressing it and letting it fester until finally it oozes out.  And as a result of our suppression, justification or denial of anger we usually do a lot of damage.  Damage not only to the ones on whom our rage is focused but also to ourselves.

The Bible does not avoid discussing anger.  In fact, it is very good at voicing anger, telling stories about its effects and even giving us words to pray to God when we are angry.  A quick overview of the Psalms lets us know that it is apparently OK to pray our anger.  In fact it would not be difficult to assemble a compendium of the Psalms that one could title “Prayers for Pissed-Off People.”  One Psalm that could be included this collection is Psalm 4.  As the psalmist heads for bed the heat of his rage rises to the heavens.  His fury and frustration are due to false accusations that wrongly dishonor him and cover him with shame.  So he cries out to God to right this wrong and relieve his distress.

The pivot point of Psalm 4 is a piece of advice.  A voice of reason offers a suggestion to all angry people:

Be angry, but sin not;
commune with your own hearts on your beds, and be silent. Selah
Psalm 4:4 (RSV)

In other words, “I know you’re angry.  Who wouldn’t be angry in your situation? But for now be still.  Sit with that anger for a while.  Explore it.  Ponder it as you drift off to sleep.  Let some of the heat of that anger radiate into the heavens.  As the earth cools, let yourself cool as well.”  And then comes that word Selah.  This word is there to provide direction for the liturgist who is chanting or the musicians who are accompanying this song, but it also becomes a signal to the hearer to act on the advice.  Selah.  Pause before you start the next line.  Rest.  Wait.  Then, go talk to God: 

Offer right sacrifices,
And put your trust in the Lord.
Psalm 4:5 (RSV)

There is an abundance of anger in the world right now. It fills our waking hours and crashes into our imaginations when we are trying to enter the silence that will help us to fall asleep.  So, what do we do with our anger?  Deny it?  Go out and buy a gun and act on it?  No.  Pray it. 

At odds with my world, I cry to you, O God.  And as I cry, I am not just asking you to reverse my fortunes.  The answer to my anger does not lie in you making me the winner and them the losers. It will be about resting in you and celebrating your abundance.  It will be about a steadfast focus on the joy you have put in my heart and the assurance that this gift cannot be taken away.  The confidence I have in this will see me through. The reliance on this unending source of abundance will enliven me even in my poverty and give me energy to persevere.  

You have put more joy in my heart
than they have when their grain and wine abound.
In peace I will both lie down and sleep;
for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety. 
(Psalm 4:7-8)

David Rohrer
10/16/2020

Exercises in Empathy

Not counting equality with God as something to be exploited,
he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.
Philippians 2:6-7

Over the last year I have mentioned more than once the impact that sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Strangers in Their Own Land has had on me.  In her fascinating report of the time she spent among the folks who live in Lake Charles, Louisiana, she tries to unpack the “great paradox” lived by people who acknowledge and endure the pollution of their land by the powerful petrochemical industry and yet who also shun the government regulation that might repair and prevent it. A key aspect of her work is to identify “empathy walls” that thwart understanding and to build “empathy bridges” that promote understanding.  Essentially Hochschild lived among these folks and simply asked the  question: What does it feel like to be you? 

Hochschild’s work especially commends itself in this time of deepening political polarization, because the question “What does it feel like to be you?” directs our attention to a realm that is very different than the question “Why do you think that way?”  It moves our awareness beyond the head to the heart.  It asks us to let go of a demand that the other convince us of the logic of their position and rather demands of us the work of trying to grow in our awareness of their experience.  It sets argument aside and instead invites us to simply pay attention to what is.  Or more accurately, pay attention to who is standing in front of us and what they know simply, and perhaps only, because of who they are or how they feel.    

The lovely thing about these exercises in empathy is that we do not engage them to get at a solution or to convince one another of the right or the wrong way to think about something.  We engage in this work to simply know who the other is.  And if we experience that miracle of feeling even a sliver of what the other feels, we have made a connection that might just lessen the tension between us.  At that moment of empathy, we have entered and experienced the world as the other perceives it.  That experience makes us bigger.  It creates room in us for something we had not previously imagined.  Sure, there are miles to go before we can get to a place of agreement because of this discovery, and to be honest that agreement is likely never going to come about.  But when the personhood of the other is acknowledged and embraced, the seeds of relationship are planted, and relationship is big enough and resilient enough to hold the tension of disagreement. 

In the first chapter of Colossians St. Paul celebrates Jesus Christ as the one in whom all things hold together.  The reason for this is wrapped up in Paul’s other description of Jesus as the one who emptied himself of his divine prerogative, took on human form and humbled himself to the point of entering into our experience of death.  The way of Jesus, the mind of Christ, is the way that lets go of selfish ambition and regards others better than oneself.  The way of Jesus is the way of opening space in oneself for others.  It is a way characterized by empathy.  The space in his heart is big enough to hold all things together.

The great commandment that Jesus gives to his disciples is to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves; yet he also adds the addendum to love our enemies.  That last bit is a tall order.  Yet I think we can take a step toward it through intentional exercises in empathy.  Just as a physical therapist instructs us in how to stretch our muscles, the Holy Spirit works in us to stretch our stunted imaginations.  We cooperate with the Spirit and start the work of loving our enemies when we let ourselves imagine the truth that there is plenty of room for them in the heart of Jesus.  And once we stretch to make space for the possibility of this proximity to them, we extend that stretch to the point of asking them the question: “What does it feel like to be you?”  If we have the patience to stretch a bit farther and actually listen for their answer, we effectively take a step toward relationship.  That little crack in our armor lets some light in.  The light reveals that there is more space in us than we thought.  For the love of Christ is long and high and wide and deep and he can do abundantly more than we can ask or imagine.    

David Rohrer
10/09/2020

Opening Up

Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors,
that the King of Glory may come in.
Psalm 24:7

As a lover of words and one for whom working with words occupies a great deal of time, I have been both amused and infuriated by the vocabulary that has emerged to describe our various experiences with and rules surrounding Covid-19. One my “favorite” products of this pandemic is the absurd oxymoron “social distancing.”  Another is the title of this essay: “opening up.”  Whenever I hear this, I get a smirk on my face and the voice of the character Inigo Montoya in the film “The Princess Bride” sounds in the back of my head saying: “I do not think it means what you think it does.” 

The way that “opening-up” is used in the ongoing discussion of what we can and can’t do in the face of this global pandemic suggests that there is someone in charge who has the power to declare the doors open and thus invite and expect everyone to come rushing in to fill the spaces that they vacated in March. Imagine what happens when Disneyland opens for the day or what happens at Walmart on Black Friday and you have the picture that the phrase “opening up” conjures.  Authorities like Mickey Mouse or the man wearing the blue vest swing wide the gate and we all come streaming in.  Just say the word.  Wave us in and we’ll come back inside the sanctuary, or the tavern, or the stadium.   

The problem with this is that merely opening the door, will not open things up.  There is also that dicey little matter of who will decide to come back inside.

When I was a kid, I was always organizing clubs among the kids in the neighborhood. But what I discovered about these various clubs was that it was hard to get us together beyond the first organizational meeting.  As a remedy I devised a signal that was supposed to produce the effect of calling in the other kids for a meeting; a signal similar to how the bell or whistle at a small town fire station would call in the volunteer fire fighters.  In my case that noise was the sound of a steel rod hitting the 3-inch pipe that held up the clothesline in our back yard.  It was a pretty loud sound; but I can’t remember an occasion where banging on that pipe produced its desired effect.  The gates of the club house were declared open, but no one came streaming in.

There are actually two problems with using the phrase “opening up” to describe the return to worship in our sanctuary.  The first is that people need to be ready to come back.  The second is that the phrase all but ignores the truth of what we have been doing since we stopped meeting in the sanctuary in March.  We have not been closed.  Worship has continued.  Connections between us continue to be made.  In fact, in some surprising ways worship has become more interactive and new connections are being made that would not have been made in the narthex.  Granted there are deficiencies in this new way of worshipping and connecting.  And hands down, I would prefer to be back in that room together.  But we won’t be back there until we are fully back there and the way we will get back there will not simply be when the session votes or the pastor waves in the streaming throngs, but when the entire congregation decides to walk in the doors. And to put a finer edge on it, we will return to that space changed.  We won’t simply come back to what was.

As a member of the Session pointed out at our last meeting, the return to our sanctuary will no doubt be an organic thing.  We will grow into it gradually. This is why the session voted recently to install video equipment in the sanctuary that will allow us to accommodate worshippers who are both in the sanctuary and attending online.  With this new equipment, which should be installed sometime in late October, we will be able to connect the two congregations in one service.  What’s more, this equipment will enable us to continue to welcome our online worshippers into our sanctuary long after Covid-19 ceases to be a live concern.

Covid-19 has robbed us of a number of things, but it has not taken away our power open our hearts to God and one another.  We can still hear and respond to the psalmist’s call to lift up our heads and open the doors of our lives to the God who has chosen to be in our midst.  God’s offer of love and gift of abundant life are not going to be withdrawn.  So, let’s move forward trusting these promises and keep our hearts open to God.     

David Rohrer
10/01/2020

Redemption

Hear this, O elders, give ear, all inhabitants of the land!
Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your ancestors?
Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children,
and their children another generation.
Joel 1:2-3

The Prophet Joel’s cry at the beginning of his oracle draws attention to the uniqueness of his time.  A series of locust plagues had overtaken the land.  First came the cutting locusts, then the swarming locust, then the hopping locust, then the destroying locust. What was not eaten by one was finished off by the next.  In short, lots of loss.  Loss on a magnitude that seemed unprecedented.  So the prophet advised the people to draw their children’s attention to it and wake up to how God might still be at work even in the face of all this loss. 

Then later in the oracle Joel invites people to turn their eyes toward the future.  He announces God’s promise of salvation and repair of the damage.  “I will repay you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer and the cutter. . . .  You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you. (2:25-26)”   In short, this loss will not be the last word.

It occurs to me that this is where we human beings have often found ourselves.  Even though Joel speaks of the devastation of this locust plague as if it is unprecedented, it wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last time that people would find themselves living in that liminal space between the wake of destruction and the anticipation of restoration; between the tragedy that has passed and the repair that is yet to come.  There is despair that occupies much of that space but there is also hope that invites us to consider what lies beyond the rubble.  If we are people of faith the source of this hope is found in trusting God to redeem the situation and usher us into that broad and open space where we gladly receive and feast on the fruit of his steadfast love. 

In our day,  fires that are consuming big patches of the Western states, the invisible yet powerful presence of the corona virus, and the disparities and polarities that are at work in our social interactions, have teamed up to cut huge swaths of destruction in our world.  Like the cutting, swarming and destroying locusts in Joel’s world, they have done a pretty good job of consuming a good bit of what has sustained us.  Yet as we sit in this liminal space of wondering when the rains will come, when an effective vaccine will be introduced or when bridges over our divisions might be constructed, there is still a prayer to pray.  It is a prayer based on the hope that the destruction caused by this triumvirate of plagues will not be the last word.  It is a prayer that both springs from hope and also builds hope in us.  It is the prayer that asks God to show us how he is at work right now to redeem the effects of this destruction.

Yet here’s the thing. . . .  This redemption isn’t merely about returning us to the place we occupied before the plague.  Repaying the years that the locusts have eaten doesn’t mean that we will feel like we felt before the locusts did their damage.  Nothing can change the truth that the locusts have eaten those years and the scars caused by their devastation will not go away.  Like the nail marks on the wrists and ankles of the resurrected Christ give witness to the truth of the darkness from which we needed to be delivered, some memory of that from which we have been delivered will always remain.  And it is to our benefit that this is so.  For that memory is a source of gratitude and praise.  It leads us to apprehend just how wide and high and broad and deep the love of God is.  In the relief we know after being delivered from the fowler’s snare we sing a new song.  It’s a song of redemption.  It’s a song about how the sources of our despair did not have the last word.  It’s a song of celebration of the truth that there is no plague that can separate us from the love of God.

David Rohrer
09/12/2020

The Idolatry of Ideology

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.
Ephesians 4:14-16

Over the years of being in pastoral ministry I have not been able to overcome the sort of autonomic cringe I experience when I get a call from the church receptionist telling me that there is someone on the line or someone at the front desk who has asked to speak to “a pastor.”  In most cases it is someone who either wants to sell me something that would be of “supreme benefit to my people” or someone who needs assistance that I know we usually cannot easily provide.  I suppose the cringe is about having to divert my attention from the things on my to do list in order to give space to someone with whom I am not, and following the phone call or encounter, probably will not be, in a continuing relationship.  But occasionally, I learn from these interactions.  They become God’s gift to me even if I do not build a lasting relationship with the person on the other end of line. 

Not long after I came to University Presbyterian in Seattle I had one such unplanned appointment.  A man had come to our welcome desk and asked to see a pastor.  I happened to be the one who the receptionist called and so I sat down with the man to talk awhile.  The man’s first question to me was: “Are you a Promise Keeper?” I thought it an odd question.  Although I knew what he meant.  He was asking if I had attended the Promise Keeper men’s conference that had been held at the Kingdome in Seattle in the mid 90’s.  He was African American and wanted to be sure I was someone who had made a commitment to racial reconciliation, one of the seven promises that a Promise Keeper was asked to make.  Well I had attended the conference and I had made the promises so we were off to a good start.  But in talking with him it became apparent that he had some needs that could best be addressed with another person on our staff who worked both with the homeless and with mental health support groups and resources.  So I connected him with my colleague and pretty much left it at that.  I handed him off and could get back to my list.

Not so fast.  A few weeks later he came back.  This time he asked for me by name at the reception desk. We connected and he let me know immediately that he was not happy about the referral.  He didn’t want to work with my colleague.  He said, almost spitting the words at me as he uttered them, “That man is an activist.  I don’t trust him or people like him.”  I’m not sure I fully understood what he meant, but whatever activist meant to him, it was in his mind not even close to the meaning of the other label he had previously used with me: Promise Keeper.  Promise Keepers were trustworthy, Activists were not. 

Both were ideological labels. These kinds of labels act as filters or lenses that become the evaluative criteria by which we judge the possibility of viable relationship with another.  They are the means by which we cut to the chase and make early decisions about whether an encounter is worth our time.  Why should I talk to her she voted for Trump?  I can’t read his book, he’s a socialist?   He’s a right wing nut job.  She’s a fuzzy headed leftist radical.  Fascist.  Antifa.  Whatever the category is, the net effect of naming it is to release us from any responsibility of having to engage with this other with whom we cannot agree.

Integrity requires me to admit that this man’s evaluative labels were not that much different than the conclusions I made about those anonymous requests to speak to a pastor.  In the end we were both like dogs in a dog park quickly sniffing out who was and who was not a potential member of our pack.  It’s actually a pretty normal practice.  It’s not always harmful.  But often it is.  History is full of the details of how the assignment of these labels often gets us into trouble.  The Church has been a full participant in this activity of making the label more important than the person.  In the name of purity we have tried to eradicate those who threaten the existence of the “right” way of believing.  Sniffing out the smoke and snuffing out the fires of heresy, we take our eyes off our leader, cut ourselves off from the one who is our head, and focus on and belong to things that do not build up but only tear down.  Ideology becomes our idol and our tenacious grip on what we claim to be the “right” idea often leads us into unrighteous and destructive actions.

Jesus says it well, “It shall not be so among you (Mk 10:43).”  Among those of us who claim to follow Jesus, truth is not a thing; Truth is a Person.  We are not called to an ideology.  We are called into a relationship.  To answer Jesus’ call to follow him does not require us to sign a creedal statement or don a particular ideological label in order to embark on the journey.  Ours is not a faith that primarily describes itself in terms of the tenets of what we think or believe.  At its foundation it is a walk of faithfulness with a Lord whose mind we are called to share.  And the mind of Jesus Christ, the mind of this person we are called to follow, is a mind that is willing to look beyond its own interests and in humility to regard others as better than ourselves (Philippians 2:3-4).  Start here and ideology takes its proper place because we start walking with a living Lord and begin that journey on which we “grow up in every way into him who is our head.”  This is the identity that knits us together into one body.  This is the means by which we are built up in love.      

David Rohrer
09/01/2020

Labels

“Lead me to the rock that is higher than I”
Psalm 61:2

A couple of weeks ago I preached on this text from Psalm 61.  Whenever I read this prayer I am always cowed by its wisdom.  “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”  In other words:   Lord, elevate me to a place where I have something more than merely my own power and perspective. Lift me to the place where I can take in a bigger picture.  Help me to see what I cannot see from the narrow and cramped cell where I have only myself and people like me as a point of reference.  Let me experience the liberty that I can know only when I understand myself to be a part of something bigger than myself and the world that I have created.

In this era when the fruits born of our various political, racial, gender, and economic disparities are on full display, it seems to me that this prayer is one that all sides can and ought to pray.   In fact, I might even assert that it is the prayer that is actually the foundation of all our prayers.  Like a stem cell, it is the prayer that gives birth to every other prayer we pray.  For to be lifted to the rock that is higher than ourselves requires us to not only acknowledge a power greater than ourselves who does the lifting, but also the relinquishment of our own power to don and assign the various labels that keep us in those cells of polarity and disparity. 

Assigning labels seems like an appropriate thing to us when we do it.  It helps us to order life.  It suggests a framework of understanding and an organization of society.  We have categories for friend and foe, right and wrong, safe and unsafe.  Labels help us embrace those who will return our embrace and keep away from those who seek our harm.  Labels help us to identify goals and provide a framework for defining priorities.  We land on a worldview, a way of knowing, and a framework for understanding that gives shape to our lives and so creates a space that seems safe.  As a good diagnosis defines the course of treatment for a disease, labels help us to know how we are going to engage life and make decisions.

But here’s the thing, those labels we don for ourselves or assign to others can never tell the whole story.  The full story is always bigger. Always more complex.  Always defying the limits of the label.  While labels have a short term asset of helping us to root out and excoriate the sinners and create and elevate the saints, they ultimately wear thin as we realize that the line between these two groups is not as dark and definitive as we might have thought.  Better societal definitions of the oppressor and the victim, sinners and saints, heroes and villains are not the primary catalyst for real change.  Those labels indeed tell the truth, but not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 

Why do we think that defining polarities and waging wars based on these polarities can lead us to that higher place where all will be well?  I suppose, history testifies to the wisdom of Hegel’s dialectic.  It’s not hard to make the argument that a succession of battles between various theses and antitheses will gradually produce the synthesis of a new order.  There is some truth in the theory that we will evolve as the factions who have donned conflicting labels battle it out and go through those pendulum swings of gaining or losing power. But history also shows that an endless succession of winners and losers produces an endless succession of attempts by either the defeated to reclaim what they’ve lost or hegemonistic despots to ruthlessly hold onto what they’ve gained.   

It’s only the truth that is bigger than the label that can set us free. That’s why Jesus’ words about attending to the matter of the log in our own eye before we attempt to remove the speck in our neighbor’s eye gets us a step closer to that rock that is higher than ourselves.  Giving attention to that log requires us to use our power to address a thing that we have the power to change.  God has pledged to come alongside us in this work.  The winds of the Spirit can elevate us to the rock that is higher than ourselves.  And what liberty there is when we take in the view of that broad and open space of a life where we belong to One who has delivered all of us out of the tiny world of self.     

David Rohrer
06/26/2020

In Plenty and In Want

“I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Philippians 4:12-13

I have officiated at hundreds of weddings in my 38 years of pastoral ministry.  It is one of the privileges of playing the role my calling invites me to play.  People invite me into their lives and ask me to sit awhile in their world in order to give witness to God’s presence and pray for God’s blessing.  So for that time, I sit with them and talk with them and pray for them.  Yet when the four weeks of pastoral counselling and the weekend of celebration have passed, my notes from the ceremony and the couple’s results from the Prepare Inventory go into a file; I bless this bride and groom on their way, and for the most part they pass out of my readily accessible memory. 
 
Yet some have found a place closer to the front of my mind.  Their stories and my experience with them make a memorable impression; they become God’s gift to me, the Spirit’s tools in my own spiritual formation.  One such couple came across my path in the early years of my work.  This rather affluent, ok let’s just say it, REALLY WEALTHY, couple asked me to perform their wedding.  Their union was no doubt as much merger as marriage.  They were not a part of the church where I was serving but asked me to perform a ceremony that was to be held at the yacht club.  In the fourth week of our pre-wedding meetings when it came time to plan the ceremony, I went over various examples of wedding vows from which they could choose.  They settled on the traditional vows in the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship.  But one phrase caught the groom’s eyes and pointing to it he said, “I don’t think we need to promise this.”  The phrase was in the list of conditions in which a bride and groom both promise to remain faithful to each other. He was pointing at the line “in plenty and in want.” 
 
This young man could not conceive of the contingency that would necessitate making this promise.  He had plenty, he had never not had plenty, and the thought that he might one day not have plenty was not accessible to him.  It was a dumbfounding experience for me.  I knew in my heart he needed to be challenged on this but I also knew that this was not an arguable point with him.  So in the inexperience of my early years of pastoral ministry, I had neither the confidence nor the categories by which to express my dismay.  I silently acquiesced to his wishes and we left this line out of the ceremony. 
 
As I periodically ponder this exchange I always feel sad and Jesus’ words about rich men and the camel passing through the eye of the needle come to mind.  For what I know now beyond any doubt is that the state of wanting, the experience of poverty, is essential if we are ever going to follow Jesus and walk on the way of faith.  The gnawing emptiness of want is the gateway to abundant life.  We need only go to the first words in Matthew’s rendering of Jesus’ stump speech, the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.  Blessed are the poor. . . , blessed are those who mourn. . . , blessed are the meek. . . , blessed are those who hunger and thirst. . . .  In short: Happy are those in touch with their emptiness because they are ready to be filled.
 
Poverty and the discomfort of want are not the normative experience for most middle and upper class North Americans.  We might at times compare ourselves with those who are more “well-heeled” than we are and feel a bit disadvantaged; but for the most part our relative degree of affluence in comparison with the rest of the world keeps us in a sort of steady state of not thinking that much about wealth or poverty.  I know I didn’t ever feel economically privileged until I spent two weeks at a theological seminary in Pune, India in 1985.  On that trip I spent one night in the Centaur Hotel near the airport in Mumbai (Bombay) before I flew out to Pune the next day.  The cost of the room was 700 rupees, about $55 at the time.  In talking with other pastors at the seminary a week later, I discovered that for a one night stay I had spent the equivalent of the average monthly salary of a pastor.
 
Hunger, poverty, grief and meekness, are not our norm.  So when they encounter us we find ourselves ill-prepared for the work of mining them for the blessing hidden in this ore.  Covid-19 and the racial unrest of these days are presenting us with the invitation to engage in this work of excavation.  The poverty of isolation from one another, the weight of a deeply rooted and seemingly insoluble problem,  the threat to our peace that we feel, the loss of freedoms that we had taken for granted, or the fear that comes with facing into the truth of an uncertain future all have embedded within the them the severe mercy of facing into our hunger.  They give us a vehicle by which to identify with the deer longing for flowing streams (Ps. 42), the prisoner sitting in darkness and gloom (Ps. 107) and the famished longing of a soul wandering aimlessly in dry and weary land (Ps. 63).
 
When we know we are in want, when we feel hunger, when we are consumed by the truth that we have nothing to consume, we are ready to be filled.  We are invited beyond that vague sense of restlessness that otherwise occupies the waking hours of most of our days.  That restlessness is not hunger so much as it is a fear of hunger.  It is this fear that fuels our consumer economy and sends us on that futile quest for the thing that will bring us peace because it holds out the false promise of ending our waiting for the unknown thing we are wanting.   
 
There is no better feeling than eating when one is deeply hungry and drinking when one is truly thirsty.  Awareness of deprivation is the gateway to joyous fulfillment.  Thank God for the opportunity of these days to recognize just how hungry our world is.  And more importantly, thank God that God is ready and waiting to feed us.                      

David Rohrer
06/12/2020

Paradox and Praise

“There seems to be ample evidence to suggest that singing creates a quantity of fine aerosols
that can stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, move with air currents,
and stay infectious for many hours, exposing virtually everyone in a building.
Our sources strongly recommend against singing indoors in public until a vaccine is widely available and widely used. For similar reasons, the use of wind instruments should also be avoided.”
(from “Church Music in the Age of Covid-19”, Wisconsin Council of Churches)

Reading this caution issued by the Wisconsin Council of Churches was one of the more memorable low points for me in the journey through the Covid-19 crisis.  It has been matched only by a list of alternatives to singing that I also saw printed in a similar piece of ecclesiastical policy.  But that said, I also cannot deny the truth behind this admonition.  We need only recall the cautionary tale of the Skagit Valley Chorale’s rehearsal earlier this year.  60 people gathered for a 90 minute choir rehearsal and within days, 45 people in the choir were sick with Covid-19 and I believe four of those people died as a result of the disease. 

The notion of singing being a vehicle for the spread of a potentially lethal contagion was never something I thought about before now.  While I have thought about it as a way of spreading something contagious, those contagions were always life giving rather than death dealing.  It has always been a vehicle to disseminate truth and beauty.  It has the power to help us express our joy and our pain.  It invites us to join the groan that is too deep for words and the shout that resounds above the heavens.  Singing fosters hope in us when we are down in the pit of despair and leads us to that rock that is higher than ourselves.  Singing together helps us to transcend the limits of our mortal condition and at least approach, if not pierce, the veil between heaven and earth.   

To be very frank, I don’t know what corporate public worship is if it does not include congregational singing. 

Yet here we are, encountering yet another Covid-19 oxymoron borne of the paradox that it daily invites us to engage.  We can now add worship without singing to the list which includes phrases like social distancing and sheltering in place. As a congregation we are confronted by the paradox of working to preserve and build community when it is dangerous to gather in close proximity to one another.  We can neither deny the validity of the warning to keep our distance nor turn away from the truth that isolation itself is a danger to us.  So as I wrote last week, it’s time to get creative.  The severe mercy of engaging this paradox is that it invites us to pursue and rest in the bigger Truth who is allowing those two competing realities to exist in the same world.

The severe mercy of this paradox is that it invites us to pray, “Lord, how are you at work here, and how can I be a part of that work?” It invites us to look for and then strive to be a part of what God is up to.  It is to seek to live in awareness, as two great catechisms in our tradition remind us, that our only comfort in life is that we belong to God and our chief end in life is to glorify God and enjoy God forever.  In short, it is to dedicate our lives to the praise of God.

Often when we think about praising God we think first about the actions associated with praise.  We confuse the big reality of praise with the ways we express it.  Praise is more than thanksgiving and adoration.  Praise is about more than singing or spoken acclamations.  Praise is not merely the attitude of falling to our knees or lifting our hands to the heavens.  Praise is a way of being.  It is the awareness that every moment has everything to do with the living God.  It is a heart that beats because of God.  It is the awareness of God’s presence and the longing for that awareness when we are experiencing what feels like God’s absence.  Praise or the act of glorifying God is what we are and what we do when we sense the heaviness that elevates us.  The Hebrew word for this glorious presence is kabod¸ which also means heavy.  Praise is being overwhelmed by the weight of God’s glory. 

There are infinite ways we can express our awareness of the presence of this infinite God.  Singing is certainly among them.  But it by no means exhausts them.  During his triumphal entry into Jerusalem Jesus reminded the Pharisees of this fact.  When they complained about the song the adoring crowd was singing and told Jesus to silence them, he replied: “If these were silenced even the rocks would cry out.”

So even if we are silenced with respect to indoor singing, how can we listen for the song the rocks are singing?  How can we participate in those songs that are more than songs, those songs that never stop singing? A line from the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” came to me as I was thinking about singing and the potential temporary loss of it in our indoor worship.  As I was complaining to God, and whoever else would listen, about the sheer stupidity and incomprehensibility of this ban on indoor singing I heard this prayer:

Come Thou Fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
streams of mercy never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above;
praise the Mount, I’m fixed upon it, Mount of Thy redeeming love.

How ironic! A song reminded me that there are infinite means of expressing praise.  Hearts do not necessarily need a diaphragm, lungs and a larynx to sing the songs that issue forth from their depths.  When my feet are planted firmly on the rock of the Mount of God’s redeeming love, I have unlimited means of reveling in that gift.  For that love is broad and long and high and deep and we will never arrive at the place where we completely comprehend it.  We will always be growing in our awareness of it and thus always learning ways to express our sheer joy in the gift of being surrounded by it.

David Rohrer
05/29/2020