In October, 2016 Creator Lutheran Church identified a vision of who we are and wanted to become as a congregation. We sent this along with our other ministry desires to our Bishop's office during a pastoral call process. The phrase "The pioneer and perfecter of our faith" comes from certain translations of Hebrews 12:2 (others translate the word Αρχηγος as author) . This January we explore Creator's mission again with Pastor Ray and, today, these words hold added meaning.
Together with other ministry visions and desires we included some prosaic details about Creator for potential pastoral candidates, "Located in the bedroom community of Happy Valley, Creator Lutheran is 30 minutes from Mt. Hood and 2 hours from the Pacific. While we embrace the beauty of the nature around us, we acknowledge the community inequities outside our door and strive, together, to bring change and hope to our lives and community."
We did not specify that the church is also near the end of the Oregon Trail. And, perhaps, this is a reason that imagining Jesus as a pioneer of our faith deeply stirs our hearts at Creator. This place where we worship was a wilderness for pioneers several generations ago. Here was also where many of those pioneers built their lives, feeling they had reached a promised land.
Unlike the pioneers of the past, Jesus is a pioneer leader concerned primarily with faith and the Kingdom of God. He was unafraid when encountering physical or spiritual wilderness. Jesus also knew the demands and temptations of settling in a new Promised Land. He faced and navigated the new and gave us visions and ways to perfect our faith.
In this context, the baptism of Jesus by John is particularly meaningful today given Creator's recent Advent journey. Our Advent study reminded us that the Jordan River in the Bible is important because the river demarcates wilderness from the new Promised Land.
The children of Israel cross the Jordan River in the Old Testament to enter their Promised Land from their forty year long wilderness journey. In the New Testament John the Baptizer baptizes his followers in the Jordan, including Jesus despite Jesus being proclaimed by John as someone greater than himself. This is begins the reversals of what would be expected in Jesus' baptismal story.
Now add to that the followers baptized by John while thinking about wildernesses and Promised Lands. People flock to John come to the Jordan River - from the "wilderness" of their former Promised Land. These pilgrims are destined for a new Promised Land. Geographically this new Promised Land is not just a place contained by earthly borders.
For years I worked on an ELCA Synod Team involved in coming up with a future church vision. We lamented the fact that for generations the church had been The Place, the most important gathering place for those generations. Later church was A Place, one of a number of important gathering places for my parent's generation and perhaps my generation. Finally it was No Place for what they labeled as millennials. Many do not feel the importance of church in their lives.
No one argued how correct these assessments were but the team did not know what to do with these insights. Today's Gospel was revelatory in another way that was related to the Advent Journey insights on John and the River Jordan. The Promised Land beyond borders is No Place. Pilgrims like us can physically live anywhere and still be a part of the new Promised Land Our spiritual concern has moved beyond an ecological concern only for the land we inhabit. We know this is about the entire planet. Given this, how will life in this Promised Land be lived and how should this Promised Land be described? For one vision I quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers:
It always seems to me that we are trying anxiously in this way to reserve some space for God; I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in man’s life and goodness. As to the boundaries, it seems to me better to be silent and leave the insoluble unsolved.
Belief in the resurrection is not the ‘solution’ of the problem of death. God’s ‘beyond’ is not the beyond of our cognitive faculties. The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.
That is how it is in the Old Testament, and in this sense we still read the New Testament far too little in the light of the Old. How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something that I’m thinking about a great deal, and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. It may be that on us in particular, midway between East and West, there will fall a heavy responsibility.
Another vision of living in the Promised Land is expressed for me in the R.E.M. song You Are The Everything which, oddly enough, was sung this last Friday at a Portland benefit concert for a local musician. Thees lyrics in particular paint a portrait of pilgrim and the Promised Land world as one:
All you hear is time stand still in travel
And feel such peace and absolute
The stillness still that doesn't end but slowly drifts into sleep
The stars are the greatest thing you've ever seen
And they're there for you
For you alone, you are the everything
Pastor Ray's preached about wilderness and the Promised Land and God comes to us when we are in the wildness. He also suggested a belief he thought we might share that Jesus did not need to be baptized. If the idea is that the primary function of baptism involves purification or becoming more acceptable in God's sight this may be true. I am currently drawn more strongly to the statement what we sang in the Offertory hymn Waterlife:
A simple sweet beginning, a lovely place to start:
Christ began the singing that swells within my heart
There is the power of community and identity in baptism and Jesus' baptism is as important to the identity we are being baptized into as it is for everyone to participate in communion. Since Jesus was son of man as well as son of God his need for baptism was the same as ours.
This is Creator's first worship service of 2018 and I was struck by how this service dramatized that our God is indeed a God of surprise and reversal.
No comments:
Post a Comment