July, 2024

“To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.”  So proclaims the writer of Proverbs, using “seasons” metaphorically to speak of the changing circumstances of our lives. Scripture also speaks of the seasons more literally, as in Genesis 8:22: “As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” In this promise, following the flood, God pledges from that time forward to preserve the earth and its seasons. And so we, as part of God’s creation, continue to live our lives within the context of that rhythm of changes.

Each season brings its own delights, the colors of autumn, the freshness of spring, and winter’s invitation to hibernate and restore ourselves. Summer, too, bestows its particular blessings. This congregation experiences some of those in a unique way through your garden, “Emmanuel Farm.” Here summer means harvesting the fruit of your labor and sharing the earth’s bounty with others. Sometimes we have reminders of that, as when fresh sprigs of basil from the garden were offered last Sunday, alongside the cookies at coffee hour. That’s not something that happens at every church! Those sprigs were a reminder of the gifts of God’s creation.

While there are invitations in every season to appreciate those gifts, summer issues a particular summons to many. It’s a time to travel, to take in new sights, to hike in the mountains and enjoy the waters, or simply sit on our porches at night and gaze at the stars – the heavens which proclaim God’s glory. I encourage you to take time to behold that glory, which is all around us here in the Pacific Northwest and is especially evident this time of year. Our outdoor worship service on August 11 will focus on God’s creation. Your mindfulness to the ways God speaks to you through nature will help you prepare to enter fully into that time. Since that service won’t be “zoomed,” I hope some who usually join us online will join us in person that day and stay afterward for the barbeque.

Meanwhile, there are other events happening in August, which you will read about in this newsletter, opportunities for learning and for service. These various ways of being together strengthen your fellowship, and build up the body of Christ, which we’ve been hearing about in our series on Ephesians.

Happy summer!

Pastor Janet

God's Meta-Story: A Sermon Series on Ephesians

Dear Emmanuel Presbyterian church family, I’ve been with you nearly three months now as your transitional pastor. It’s been a time of learning for me, learning names, for instance. I’m still working on that! More importantly, of course, has been getting to know the people attached to those names. I’ve so appreciated how warm and welcoming you have been. This has also been a time of learning about you as a congregation, about your passions, like mission, and about your customary ways of doing things. Those are a bit different in every church, and I want to thank those who’ve helped me navigate my course here.

So far, my sermons here have been shaped by time and by context; first by a focus on transition, and then largely by the liturgical calendar. In June I will begin a sermon series based on the Letter to the Ephesians. Ephesians invites us to step back from our usual ways of viewing things -- the world, the church, our own lives – and to see them all, to see everything, in light of God’s big picture, God’s cosmic plan from the beginning of time. It calls us, in other words, to see ourselves within the context of God’s huge, unfolding story.

Eugene Peterson, in the book featured by our current book group (Eat This Book), calls readers to see Scripture as a narrative. The Bible, he writes, “turns out to be a large comprehensive story, a meta-story.” And a story “invites our participation.” When we read Scripture appropriately, he argues, we allow its stories to “form” us, to shape us. “When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.” We don’t always reflect on God’s big story, but instead tend to focus on our own much smaller ones. Ephesians is about that larger story, God’s story, in which we’re called to find ourselves.

This epistle has traditionally been seen as addressed to the Christian community at Corinth, but that designation is missing in some important early manuscripts. It seems likely, instead, that it was intended as a circular letter, that is, one meant to be taken around to various churches. It’s suggested that the name of the addresses was left out so that it could be filled in with the name of whatever congregation it reached. And so, we may consider it addressed “to the church that is at Bothell, Washington,” that is, even to us.

Pastor Janet

June 1, 2024

A Lenten Invitation

I’ve been on the job here at Emmanuel for nearly two weeks now, and this Sunday I’ll step into the pulpit for the second time. I appreciated the chance to meet many of you last Sunday and look forward to meeting more this week. Thank you for wearing your name tags! It’s a great help, not only to me, but I suspect to some others as well.

In my brief time here, I’ve already had the chance to meet with the Session and with the Preschool Board, both important bodies guiding the mission and ministry of this congregation. I want to thank everyone for making me feel welcome. I look forward to partnering in ministry with both of these groups, as well as with all of you, during this transitional time.

With so much focus on transition, including my own inaugural sermon, it seems there’s been little emphasis on Lent, except for the Ash Wednesday service led by Adrienne Schlosser-Hall. This Sunday, I’ll share a message based on the lectionary passage for the fifth Sunday in this holy season. Then we’re already on to Palm Sunday and Holy Week, which will include a Maundy Thursday service at 7:00 p.m. on March 28th. Then, of course, we’ll celebrate the Resurrection on Sunday, the 31st.

I invite you to make these waning days of Lent a time of reflection and prayer, pondering the magnitude of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ, and considering your faithful response. If you haven’t done so in a while, this might be a good time to read through the Passion narrative in one of the Gospels, those stories leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion. Don’t hurry through just to get it done. Don’t even feel like you have to get all the way through, just to say you’ve done it. Take your time. Meditate on the words. See what speaks to you of God’s love, what reveals to you God’s grace. So may you be truly ready to celebrate the amazing news of Easter.

Pastor Janet

March 15, 2024

A Hint of Glory

“Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John,
And led them up a high mountain apart by themselves.
And he was transfigured before them,
and his clothes became a dazzling white,
such as no one on earth could bleach them.
And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking to Jesus.”
Mark 9:2-4

This morning, this last Sunday morning I am with you as your pastor, is designated on the liturgical calendar as the day commemorating the transfiguration of the Lord.  The day comes just before Ash Wednesday which begins the season of Lent.  We get a hint of Jesus’ glory and divinity just before we move into the season where we focus on his humanity and humiliation.

The thing I love most about the story of Jesus’ transfiguration has to do with what it says about us.  And it is Peter, as usual, who mirrors this characteristic.  Never at a loss for words, Peter responds to this invitation to silence and wonder with a commentary: “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses and one of Elijah.”  In other words: “Wow, this is really cool, Teacher!  Look how shiney you are.  We need to do something to commemorate this moment. Let’s build three shrines up here and turn it into a pilgrimage site.  Maybe we could even sell tickets.”
 
Yet when it was all over, and they were coming down off the mountain, Jesus invites them to a different response.  In fact he orders that response.  He essentially says, “Let’s keep quiet about this for now. The time will come for the celebration of my glory.  For now just keep this to yourselves; be still and savor it.”
 
As religious people we love to build shrines. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Afterall, it grows out of an experience of God’s presence, it points to an encounter with the Holy, a moment when eternity has broken into time and in which we feel confirmed in our faith.  So of course we quite naturally want to hold onto it, share it with others, do something to make concrete and permanent what is a momentary, almost subliminal, flash.
 
Yet we should take heed of Jesus’s advice to his disciples.  Often the best response to these visions is to plant them deep in our hearts and let them be part of what empowers us to take the next faithful step on the journey of faith.  These hints of glory are not ultimately given to draw attention to themselves and therefore something to be enshrined and celebrated, they are given to move us forward.
 
One of the things I deeply appreciate about my 11 years at Emmanuel as your pastor is that you were not a people who spent much time trying to draw my attention to and join you in a celebration of your past.  In fact I arrived shortly after you had torn down a couple of your shrines.  I arrived at a place where I rarely heard what is an all too familiar and unfortunate death knell in many congregations: “We’ve never done it this way before.”  By tearing down your building and rebuilding it you effectively pushed a reset button.  I suppose that most of you had little energy to call my attention to how things had always been done, instead you were primed to do something new in a new place.
 
Thank you for that.  And if I have a last word for you, it is: “Keep doing this!” Give your new pastor the same gift. Keep your eyes focused forward, looking for how Jesus is out in front guiding you into an awareness of what is yet to be.  Your foundation is not all the glorious things that have happened, it is the ever- growing relationship you have with the One in Whom all things cohere (Colossians 1:17).  In short, continue to strive to simply be the Church.  From this location at the intersection of 104th and 195th in Bothell, seek to do nothing more and nothing less than look for the ways that God is at work in you and around you and then reflect the light of God’s love to your neighbors.   
 
“Put these words in your heart and soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand and fix them as an emblem on your forehead”; take Hebrews 10:19-25 to heart:

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary
by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us
through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), 
and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 
 let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith,
with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience
and our bodies washed with pure water.  
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering,
for he who has promised is faithful.
And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, 
 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some,
but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

 
David Rohrer
The Transfiguration of the Lord
2/11/2024

The Promise of an Open Future

“. . . and your old men shall dream dreams.”

(Acts 2:17 & Joel 2:28)

When I was a seminary student and a candidate for ordination in the early 80’s I attended a meeting of my Presbytery where one of the pastors preached a sermon that bore the title that I have borrowed for this essay.  I cannot remember the text on which the sermon was based; nor can I remember much of its content, but the title has bored its way into some deep space in my memory and imagination. I have thought of it often throughout my years in pastoral ministry and come to see it as one of the more important Divine promises to us.  What I see in this promise is an invitation to dream dreams.  The invitation comes as a response to the truth that the God who made us for relationship with himself, with one another and with all of creation has always been with us and will not leave or forsake us.

It is good to know that we never need to stop dreaming dreams.  As a 20-something anticipating ordination I was one of those young men with visions that Joel and Luke also speak about, and now as a mid-60-something anticipating retirement I am one of those old men who can still look ahead and dream dreams.  The diminution of youthful energy doesn’t diminish the hope born of the steadfast love and faithfulness of God toward us and while I may be stepping out of active service in the church, I am still very much involved in the drama that is being played out in our world.  And I have come to realize that it is the responsibility of the old to invite the young look into the unknown that is ahead of them, not through the lenses of fear and despair, but in the assurance that Jesus Christ will be with us “even to the end of the age.”

In saying this I in no way wish to imply that inviting the young to see the openness of the future is merely a matter of adopting a positive attitude.  If we invite the young to gaze into the unknown future in denial of the way present circumstances are inviting us to despair and anxiety, we do so to the detriment of our society.  If we merely point to some ultimate promise of heaven or resort to the simplistic invitation to relax because “God is in control,” we invite the apathy and passivity that comprise the soil in which selfishness and narcissism flourish and so waste the energy they have to be active reflectors of the love of God in our world.

In these days I take my inspiration from old folks like Simeon and Anna (Luke 2:25-38) who can hold an all but anonymous baby in their arms and give voice to the promise he embodies.  I aspire to be like Gamaliel (Acts 5:33-39) who invited younger Pharisees to step back from their righteous indignation, murderous rage and mission to purge heretics, and to take a long hard look at what God might be up to.  I want to be like the woman described in Proverbs 31 who wears clothing made of “strength and dignity” and who can “laugh at the time to come.”  Age gives us the benefit of a loose grip.  We simply do not have the energy to be a part of the tug of war that attempts to pull everyone over to our side.  We must instead resort to the gentleness that is born of the truth that “the Lord is near” (Philippians 4:4-7) and invite those around us to zoom out and take in the bigger picture that always dwarfs our particular affections and observations about the world in which we currently find ourselves.

What I am talking about is the choice to move forward in faithfulness as we respond to God’s faithfulness toward us.  I’m talking about the choice to “go out in joy and be led forth in peace.”  The call of Jesus is always forward.  Always, as C.S. Lewis wrote, a call to move “further up and further in.”  It’s a call to dream dreams because as we journey forward we are in the embrace of God and thus always facing into an open future confident that God is about to show us a new thing.

“For you shall go out in joy and led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial,
for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”
Isaiah 55:12-13

David Rohrer
01/14/2024

One Long River of Song

I will make a way through the wilderness, rivers in the desert.
Is 43:19

Lately, the words endurance and resilience have been on my mind.  As I have pondered these words and their relationship to our spiritual lives, I have imagined them in a kind of dance with one another.  They both describe resources we need to sustain the journey of faith.  In one way they are synonyms. They both speak of sustained dedication and perseverance.  Yet in another way they are almost antonyms in that one speaks to something we do and the other speaks to something we are.  Endurance is about an active exertion of our energy.  Resilience is a state we settle into but do not necessarily create. 

It's kind of like the difference between swimming and floating.  It’s the interplay between pursuing a goal and being carried toward a destination. What’s more, whether we think of ourselves as swimming or floating, when we are in the water, we are always doing a bit of both.  We are always buoyed up by the water and always moving our arms and legs (sometimes gently and sometimes vigorously) so that we can take a breath and see our destination. 

It's also like the difference between singing and listening to a song.  To sing requires breath and exertion.  We are participating in and cooperating with the work of a composer and an accompanist.  We are adding our voice to other voices, listening to what is happening around us and contributing to the making of melody and harmony.  But we are also surrounded by something that would sound whether we contributed to it or not.  The song carries us, buoys us up, lifts us to heights we would not scale if it were not sounding. 

Both of these metaphors come together in the title I have chosen for this essay, “One Long River of Song.” This title is not my creation. It is the title of a collection of posthumously published essays by Brian Doyle.  Maybe this title is the creation of David James Duncan who helped to assemble these essays in the wake of his friend’s death.  But whatever its source, it is a very apt description of this interplay between endurance and resilience, swimming and floating, singing and listening, striving and resting that characterizes the spiritual life.  The journey of faith is like the navigation of “one long river of song.”

Throughout my years in pastoral ministry, I have come to experience Isaiah 40-55 as one long river of song.  It is a series of songs the prophet gave to a defeated and exiled people who are on the verge of repatriation.  These songs seamlessly and fluidly move back and forth between a call to action and an invitation to rest.  Through these songs the Prophet invites his people to breathe in the air of God’s comfort and mercy and to float in the living water of grace.  But he also commands them to rouse themselves out of the stupor of a grievous captivity and to put on traveling clothes as they prepare to embark on a difficult journey towards home.  This road that they will travel will once again take them through a wilderness, yet there they will also discover rivers of living water.  

Beginning in Advent and continuing through my last Sunday in the pulpit at Emmanuel on February 11, we’ll be swimming in and floating on this one long river of song in Isaiah 40-55.  My prayer is that this exploration will both buoy us up and equip us for action.  The Way of Jesus is a gentle way that is about abiding in him and simply enjoying his presence, but it is also difficult way that demands tenacity and endurance.  Yet either way the journey is always accompanied by a song.  It’s a song that has been sounding since before the foundation of the world, a song that sang creation into existence.  Yet it is also a song that is new every morning and will sustain us for eternity.  It’s the song of God’s faithfulness and mercy and thus the source of what empowers us to respond in kind. 

David Rohrer
11/28/2023 

Finally

“Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord.”

One of the fruits of reading Jon Meecham’s biography of Abraham Lincoln earlier this year was the realization of the importance of presidential speech.  Lincoln understood that as President of the United States his public remarks could make a profound difference in the way people perceived and responded to matters of public policy and social concern.  In his first inaugural address he appealed to the “better angels of our nature,” and in his second inaugural address, delivered weeks before he was assassinated, he invited a war weary nation to move forward:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations. 

Words can encourage and edify but they can also tear down and diminish.  They can clarify and confuse.  They can motivate acts of kindness and fuel violence.  As someone who has dedicated big part of the past 41 years to the work of preaching to congregations of Christian believers, I am well aware of the importance of words.  And in these days preceding retirement I am especially aware of being in that season of contemplating and composing final words. This season begs a question:  If I am going to stop talking, what do I want to make sure I say before that cessation?

Fortunately, preaching is primarily about crafting words that are drawn from and call attention to other words.  Preaching is about giving witness to The Word.  So, I am grateful that I have a great deal of support in this endeavor of composing those final words.  It is a task that is more about choosing what not to say.  Like the processes of reduction or distillation, choosing what to preach is about bringing the most savory and simple words.  

This is the reason I have chosen to include Paul’s letter to the Philippians in my list of texts to be preached this year.  Philippians is Paul’s final word.  It is a loving and warm letter written to a beloved congregation from a prison cell in which Paul had plenty of reflection space to contemplate his life, to ask questions like what is of primary importance, what is best?  And what is important to note is that this contemplation of his end produces the fruit of joy. 

Paul’s work in his Philippian epistle is an illustration of Habakkuk’s choice to “rejoice in the Lord” irrespective of life’s circumstances.  And his last word to this beloved congregation is essentially an invitation to do the same.  “Finally, my brothers and sisters, rejoice in the Lord. (Phil 3:1)”  “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Phil. 4:8)”

Paul’s bottom line in this brief letter is to keep our eyes on the abundant love of God shown forth in the selfless love of Jesus Christ and allow that love to plant what becomes a harvest of righteousness that can be shared with our world.  I love this letter and I am grateful for the opportunity to feast on and savor this part of God’s word with you as we together look forward to bearing and sharing the fruit that grows from the seed of God’s steadfast love.

David Rohrer
10/12/2023

Faithfulness

“I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart”
Habakkuk 2:1

One of the fringe benefits of 41 years of pastoral ministry is that it has afforded me the privilege of getting to spend many of my waking hours with the Bible.  I realize that sounds almost sickeningly pious. Yet this love I have for the Hebrew scriptures and the Greek writings of the early church was not born of my devotion and piety so much as it grew out of sheer fascination with the strange and wonderful collection of writings that our forebearers had the good sense to preserve and collect in one place.

The words of this book hook me. They can both draw me into a fulfilling conversation that I do not want to end and make me want to throw the book across the room in frustration for all they do not explain.  They mirror my experience, and they tell me stories that I have never lived.  They inspire me to aspire to something better and they remind me of how uninspired and base my life choices can sometimes be.  But what most arrests my imagination and defies my complete understanding is the way this book keeps giving me reasons to make space in my life for the God who created me.  More specifically, the way this book keeps reminding me that this One who created me actually wants to engage me, and not just me, but everything else this One has spoken into existence.

One of the gifts I am giving myself (and hopefully you) is to spend this last year before I retire working with texts that have been especially good friends to me over the years of pastoral ministry.  Part of what helped me to push the retirement button was the question: “What texts do I want to preach in my last year of preaching every Sunday to a congregation?”  I started this last year of preaching with Ash Wednesday and a Lenten series on Romans 8.  I will end with yet another a look at Isaiah 40-55.  I am now at the mid-point of this year and have decided to spend some time with an old friend whose name is Habakkuk.

Habakkuk is one of the 12 Minor Prophets whose works comprise the last 12 books of the Old Testament.  The Germans refer to these books as der zwolf kleinen Propheten, the twelve “little” prophets.  This designation is a measure of the length of the books and not the stature of the prophet or the importance of his message.  These little books pack a punch and Habakkuk’s contribution to this collection is profound.  For the message of this little prophet wraps itself around a very big question.  Namely, how can this God who is all powerful, all loving and completely righteous, permit evil to flourish in the world?

No one who works with this question ever arrives at a satisfactory answer.  For to “answer” it we have to deny at least one of the three propositions that go into creating it.  We have to minimize or deny the power of God and suggest that evil exists because God has no control of it.  Or we have to reason away the reality of an operative evil force in the world and suggest that evil is merely an appearance or illusion and can be wiped away if we work harder at focusing on the true reality of the goodness of God.  Or we have to deny the goodness and righteousness of God and suggest that God somehow is either unconcerned with evil, or worse, creates it and uses it for his own ends. In short, as I have said before, putting the caption “God is in control” under a photo of Boeing 767 flying into one of the Twin Towers brings me neither explanation nor comfort.  And I am not sure I see any reason to pray to the God whose “control” brings about ends such as this. 

So where do we go with this question and how do we continue to pray in the face of it?  Habakkuk gives us some direction in this matter.  He chooses to go directly to God and ask it.  By example he invites us into the struggle of prayer.  He jumps into the scrum and wrestles with God as he seeks an answer.  Habakkuk’s answer is to make the active decision to stay in relationship; to embrace and make space for the mystery of God and wait things out, trusting that God will be God, and justice and righteousness will be revealed.  “I will stand at my watchpost, and station myself on the rampart; I will keep watch to see what [God] will say to me and what [God] will answer concerning my complaint.”

Perseverance and patience hardly seem like a satisfactory response to the problem of evil.  On first viewing, the better choice seems to lie in walking away from the One whose apparent neglect or unconcern occasions the question in the first place.  Yet what leads Habakkuk and others like him to make their way to the watch tower and scan the darkness for some hint of light is the sense that they are being held by the One they are tempted to reject.  Faith at its most basic level is the choice to take the risk of trusting in the faithfulness of God.  Our faith is about faithfulness: Putting our weight down on, and resting securely in, the truth that God made us for relationship with Himself and will not let us go.

David Rohrer
09/11/2023    

Neighbors

“Please won’t you be my neighbor.”
Fred Rogers

My sister tells the story of how her then 3 year old daughter ran into the kitchen one day and announced: “Mommy, the man on the TV said I am special.”  It’s one isolated example of what was the experience of probably millions of children over the years that Fred Rogers was airing his show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood.”  Mr. Rogers figured out how to reach through the TV and touch children with the good news that they were worth talking to and listening to.  He bridged the divide not with loud noises and outrageous slapstick designed to “grab their attention,” but with a still small voice that simply said, “I’d like to get to know you and be your neighbor.” And the kids he spoke to believed him.

Fred Rogers was ordained by the Pittsburgh Presbytery in 1963 as a Minister of Word and Sacrament with a special calling to be an evangelist through the medium of public television.  With that action the presbytery brought fresh meaning to the words evangelist and minister.  Yet this new meaning was actually the resurrection of a very old meaning.  For the good news evangelists are called to give witness is the love of Jesus Christ.  Their job, the calling that the Lord issues to all of his followers, is to give witness to him by loving God and loving neighbors.  Our call is not to grab attention and make converts.  Our job is to show-up and calmly point to the One whom we follow by loving others in the same way he loved us. 

In Mr. Roger’s neighborhood the word neighbor was as much a verb as it was a noun.  It was not simply a static concept defined by geography or status.  It was a choice to act in a neighborly way.  It was synonymous with the act of being a neighbor to another.  To neighbor was to extend oneself in service to another through acts of sacrifice, friendship, generosity and love.  Fred Roger’s neighborhood of make believe was a gentle place where even acts that threatened the neighborhood were confronted in a gentle way.  And because of this it could at times seem a bit unrealistic and maybe even a bit creepy.  It was therefore easy to make fun of it and many did just that.

I have certainly been among those scoffers.  But I must admit that when my children outgrew this show, I grieved a bit.  For I needed to hear Fred Rogers call me special as much as they needed it.  I needed to recognize the Lady Elaine Fairchild, the King Friday the 13th, and the Daniel Striped Tiger in me.  I needed to hear Fred Roger’s reach out to the cynic, the narcissist, and the timid, uncertain one who lived in me.  In his gentle way, Fred Rogers was calling all of us to be gentle with those parts of ourselves that needed to be invited into a bigger space.     

There is enormous power in this kind of confident gentleness.  It is the power that does not retreat from hard truth or attempt to somehow gloss it over with feigned kindness or cheap grace.  It is the power that chooses to engage and know the other even when all evidence suggests that the chasm between the other and us can never be bridged.  It is the power that enables us to become neighbors to those we never before acknowledged to be neighbors. It’s the power embodied in Jesus, who though he was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied himself of that power for our sake and chose to become our friend and neighbor.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I will say: Rejoice.
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.
Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving
let your requests be made known to God.
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding,
will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord.
(Philippians 4:4-7)

 David Rohrer
06/16/2023

Debt

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, iii)

Whether it is the advice that Polonius gives to his son Laertes, or the Proverb that reminds us that “borrowing leads to obligation and loss of freedom (Pr. 22:7),” it is not hard to find admonitions about going into debt in a broad range of wisdom literature.   Whether we are the lender or the borrower, what is clear is that when debt is involved in a relationship the cloud of money darkens the atmosphere in which the two parties’ dwell.  Openness and equality are harder to come by when the expectation of something owed is introduced into the chemistry of a relationship. So, when we are released from a debt, we feel the air clear and the lightening of our load.

In this season when we as a congregation have just paid off our mortgage, I am thinking a lot about the role of debt in our world.  My thoughts often go to matters concerning interest rates and credit scores, borrowing capacity and reports of foreclosures, discussions of forgiveness of student loans and bank failures. These things are a part of the atmosphere we breathe.  They are familiar companions, at the forefront of our daily consciousness, reported on with minute-by-minute market updates and in command of much of both what motivates us to go to work and determines when we can retire.  So, experiencing this little bit of freedom as a result of our mortgage payoff, is like being released into the “broad and open space” that the psalmists celebrate.

But all that said, I am reminded that this feeling of freedom is not merely rooted in the truth the building is now fully ours, that we now own it free and clear, or that the absence of that $4000 from our list of monthly payments has somehow made all things new.  In one world, I suppose, this mortgage payoff changes a lot, but in another world, it changes nothing.  In many ways our mission and ministry with respect to this land on which we have constructed these buildings is the same now as it was when we first occupied this space in the mid 1960’s.  We are still called, and always will be called, to love our neighbors. And I suppose the most prominent question before us in the wake of paying off our mortgage is: in what ways are we being called to express this love in such a time as this?

The eradication of a debt has the potential of eliciting two opposite responses. It can invite a sigh of relief that says: “Ahhh, now we’re safe.  Now we can rest.  Our house is secure.”  Or it can inspire the deep breath that one might take at the beginning of a new adventure.  We can stop and celebrate a job well done or we can come around the bend, look at the road in front of us, inhale and ask, “I wonder what awaits us down this road?” 

The accomplishment of paying off our mortgage is something we need to celebrate.  And we will celebrate and thank God for the resources to do this.  But instead of putting up our feet now that we are out of debt, I’d rather that we kick up our heels in joy and find in that joy the strength to embark on a new adventure to explore territory that we haven’t yet imagined.

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.
Acts 2:17

David Rohrer
Pentecost 2023