From the Pastor
Our daughter doesn’t think I read enough fiction (and I
don’t), so she gave me two 1000-page novels by Ken Follett as a belated
birthday present a couple weeks ago. I gulped when she handed them to me,
saying “Happy Birthday, Dad!,” with an eager smile on her face. I wondered,
“Should I tell her that I already have The Lord of the Rings trilogy
(at long last) on my summer reading list, as well as getting a start on
another dozen or so theological books?”
How do you say No to your daughter? As I
write this, I’m on page 700 of the second book, The Ends of the Earth,
a sequel to the first, Pillars of the Earth. They are historical
novels set in 12th and 14th century England,
respectively. The plots center around Kingsbridge, a monastery town,
swarming with religious, civic, political, and personal intrigue, as well as
riveting, page-turning drama.
Both books display the separation of the
sacred and the secular. The sacred is what goes on within the walls of the
monastery, with its magnificent cathedral (and if you like architecture and
engineering, these books are for you!), and the secular is what happens
everywhere else. Prayer and the life of devotion are the business of the
monks (and also the nuns in the second book), while the rest of the people
come to church one day a week, primarily to receive forgiveness for their
sins, those committed in the past or those they plan (or hope) to commit in
the future.
Edna Hong, in her book From This Good
Ground (see “What I’m Reading” insert), shows us a different way for
ordinary people to understand daily life as Christians. She talks about
“home church,” with the family being the primary place for learning and
sharing faith.
Our Sunday School planning for the fall is
taking seriously the notion of home church, with implications for our entire
education program for all ages. What might home church look like in your
setting? Pass along your ideas.
Blessings,
Pastor David
What I’m Reading
July 2010
Edna Hong: From This Good Ground
I mean that at the tender age of three I had already fallen in love
with the church, and I have never fallen out of love with it. . . . Somehow
grace seemed always to be able to press in on my small soul in spite of
myself and those humans who with the best of intentions plug all the
ingresses of the soul. . . .
What I am trying to say is that in spite of imperfect communicators,
a dearth of teaching materials, and no visual aids whatsoever, something was
communicated to me by the church in my home and the church in my community.
Because of that communicated something I am not sleep-walking in the desert.
. . . What the church in my home and the church in my community did was to
develop a potential planted in me into a condition of mind and spirit that
acknowledges the presence of God. Not as a superlativity but as a positively
present. An ever-present hope in him. . .. The church in my home and the
church in my community did not extinguish that hope but built upon it, so
much so that never in my darkest moments has my hope in him flickered. In
fact, it burns brightest when my hope in me is darkest. . . .
The word of God has been coming to me through more or less imperfect
instruments all my born days, and I thank my church for those humble
servants who stammered and stuttered that word to me. I see them not as
quenchers but as keepers of the flame. Keepers of the flame sometimes are
wrongfully accursed of being quenchers, but their gift in not to add
kindling to the fire but to keep alive what has been kindles. Curse them not
because they did not blaze, but thank them for keeping the weak, guttering
flames in themselves and in us alive! Bless them for being the bearers of
the word, imperfect though they were.
For children, at least for this child, the word of God received from
the church in the home and the church in the community was like a time
capsule that activates in the spirit at some future date. . . . Even now,
half a century later, the capsulated word of God explodes in my mind and
spirit, and a verse that shed no light for me or on me the first time I
heard it—or the tenth—or the twentieth time!—suddenly illuminates. At such
times I understand how the Sleeping Princess must have felt when the prince
kissed her and woke her from her hundred years’ sleep!
The Holway Lutheran Church was three and one-half miles from home,
and when the roads were blocked with snow father put the wagon box on the
sled, covered the floor thickly with straw, and lined the box with blankets.
Here we usually sat snugly and warmly while the team plodded through the
drifts to church. But not always—for sometimes the cold was so bitter that
it invaded straw and blankets and crept into our blood and bones. The
climate of the uninsulated frame church did not reverse the polar trend. The
preacher in his high pulpit above the heat register was the only one present
who was warm. Trotting behind the sled on the return journey restored our
circulation, but the chill lingered in the marrow of our bones for house
after we reached the warmth of home. . . .
By having us baptized and naturalized (enemies of the church say
“habituated”) into the church, mother and father placed us into a world we
could not at the time realize and into a community of love for which we were
not ready. But we were there. We were not foreigners, outsiders,
strangers to this world and this community. Without our willing it so, we
were moved into this world and this community when we were weak and
defenseless, and this world and this community have been moving in on us
ever since.
So I thank my parents for not placing me painfully outside the church
but inside, where the Word could get at me—sometimes painfully—and
bring me to the center and source of gaiety, Jesus Christ.
I thank my church for placing the idea of ought into me. True,
the ought and the nots were taught me first, and true, they
sometimes were shallow and superficial ought nots. . . . But under
the tutelage of the Word and the Spirit, the ought manifested itself
until I could see that often the very goodness of the “good people,” myself
included, was selfish self-interest and disobedience to God’s ought. In
short, I learned guilt.
I thank my church not only for inculcating me with the idea of ought,
but also for giving me a concept of healthy guilt and a conviction that
there is no place for vanity in me. For guilt, because guilt is the only way
I have to know when I have hurt someone I love.
For a conviction that there is no place for vanity in me, because it
keeps me from fleeing to self-improvement programs. The only flight possible
for such as I is to Jesus Christ. There and there only I learn to hate my
faults and failings without resentment and despair. There and there only my
spirit receives from the Holy Spirit the power to break the oldest rhythm in
the world . . . the repetition of a person’s bad self.
One of my favorite childhood songs was “The Bear Went over the
Mountain.” What the bear found on the other side of the mountain was only
the other side of the mountain. The church took me over the mountain of my
sin and there I found the Kingdom of Grace. And every single moment of every
single day is transformed—not that I enjoy the here and now as it is,
enjoy the world as it is. There is another modern idea that teeters
on the edge of heresy. Here again the word which my church cherishes and
brings to me reveals that it is not the transient present world as it is
that I am to enjoy—but Christ in its concreteness, the perpetual power of
his love at work in the world here and now.
Disputed ground I was and am and will ever be in every hour of my
life in this world. This truth my church has taught me, and it is one of the
dark truths that blesses when one does not flee from it but swings around
and confronts it face to face. But the church also teaches me that I am not
a helpless, hopeless comic trapped in an absurd existential situation—as
modern literature would have me believe. The church sets me in the community
of the undismayed and undaunted who cling to Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ,
please note, clung to the tradition of the church, but purified it with his
life and death and renewe3d it with his purifying Spirit.
When all is said and done, this is perhaps why I am most deeply
grateful to the living institution of the church and will hand with it: it
is the only institution I know which has the principle of and the power for
ever-recurrent renewal. (67-76)
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