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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)


Last Updated:  July 12, 2010     Limitations & Policy