April 12, 2026 John 20:19–31 In A Time of Fear, Division, and Uncertainty

The Gospel tells us that the disciples are gathered behind locked doors “for fear.” Fear is the atmosphere of the room. Fear is the reason the doors are shut. Fear is what shapes their imagination of the future.

And then, without the doors opening, Jesus stands among them saying “Peace be with you.”

It is difficult to read this passage today without hearing echoes of our own fear and uncertainty framing so much of public life. Escalating geopolitical tensions, particularly the threat of military conflict with Iran and the resulting economic instability, have stirred global anxiety and shaken markets. Domestically, debates over public safety, youth unrest, and the balance between enforcement and care reveal a society unsure how to hold together its most vulnerable members. Politically, sharp divisions over budgets, governance, and national direction deepen a sense that we are living behind locked doors of mistrust and suspicion.

The disciples would understand this atmosphere.

They, too, were living in the aftermath of violence, disillusionment, and shattered expectations. The world they trusted collapsed at the cross, through brutal authority.  Hope was fragile. The community had scattered.

And so they locked the doors. Jesus does not wait for the disciples to become brave. He does not ask them to unlock the doors first. He enters as they are, fearful and confused.

This matters because our national assumption seems to be that fear must be mastered before peace can be known. That security must come first. A nation must not be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That strength must precede reconciliation.

The resurrection reverses that order. Peace is not the reward for overcoming fear.
Peace is the gift given within fear. “Peace be with you” is not a calming slogan so much as a disruptive presence. It interrupts the logic of anxiety that dominates both ancient Jerusalem and modern America.

Jesus shows them his hands and his side. The risen Christ is not unmarked. Resurrection transforms violence. Jesus' wounds remain visible as testimonies of love that endured suffering.

In a time when our national life is marked by deep wounds, the temptation is either to deny those wounds or weaponize them. But the Gospel offers a third way: To reveal wounds without letting them define the future. The body of Christ still bears scars, and yet speaks peace.

Thomas refuses secondhand faith. He wants to see. He wants to touch. He wants something real. Jesus does not reject him. This is crucial in a moment when many people are skeptical of the authority of institutions. When trust has eroded, doubt is not a failure; it is often a form of integrity. Thomas represents everyone who must say “I need something more than words.”

And Jesus responds not with condemnation, but with invitation.“Put your finger here.” The resurrection is not fragile. It can withstand scrutiny. It can meet us in our questions.

After speaking peace, Jesus says: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” This is the turning point where the disciples aren't just comforted, they are commissioned, rather than falling to the temptation either to retreat or to mirror the hostility of the world. Instead they are called to be people who have received peace even in systems shaped by fear.

Jesus breathes on them. And, like Creator's Easter service, this echoes Genesis, that breath of God that gives life. In the resurrection, a new creation begins through presence, peace, and forgiveness.

We are not so different from those first disciples. We know their locked door, but Jesus is not stopped by locked doors. When we are fearful he forever sends Christians out with his assuring “Peace be with you.”

April 5, 2026 Easter: From Grave to A Garden

Over the years, we have listened carefully to the resurrection stories at Easter; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Each begins at the tomb. Each begins in grief. Each begins with women who refuse to let love end.

There is one consistent detail that is mentioned in each narrative. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell us it was dawn. Light was already breaking.

John tells it differently. Mary Magdalene came to the tomb while it was still dark.

This is not a small detail. In John’s gospel, nothing is accidental. This is the same gospel that begins: “In the beginning was the Word…” Echoing the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning… when the earth was formless and void and darkness covered the deep.”

Pastor Emillie's sermon emphasized that Mary comes in the darkness, and John here is telling us something more than the time of day. He is telling us where Mary was and where we are in times of grief. We are standing at the edge of creation when the world is unmade, when we grieve, and the cross seems to have shattered hope. When she discovers the tomb is empty, nothing makes sense.

In past years, the Easter sanctuary transformation happened at the Easter Vigil service. Now it occurs just before the Easter service starts. The bustling busyness of what is done is an exciting part of our Easter tradition now.   

This year, the Thanksgiving for Baptism emphasized John's recurring theme of creation and God's Spirit moving over the water. God has placed us in a well-watered garden. We sang Take Me to the Water in response to the Thanksgiving.

Pastor Emillie preached about what Mary would have felt in her time of grief by comparing it to what Emillie's family felt when her uncle died. Mary stands weeping outside the tomb. The mystery of the empty tomb was too much at first. She then encounters a man she does not recognize. Of course, a gardener, because John is telling us something again about the first creation in a garden. 

Once there was Adam and Eve, and through them the world fell into fracture. Now there is Mary and Jesus. A woman and a man in a garden again, but this time, the story is not about grasping or loss. It is about recognition. “Mary.”

And in that moment, everything changes. Light breaks. Not just in the sky,
but in the soul. “Rabbouni.” 

Teacher. The Lord of Life. This is the first morning of the new creation. The darkness has not been avoided. It has been entered and transformed. The resurrection is not only about one man rising. It is the rebirth of the whole cosmos. The chaos of Genesis is spoken into order again. The void is filled with life again. The garden blooms again. Pastor Emille preached that Jesus commanded Mary not to grasp this moment, but rather to go and spread the news. The first witness is Mary, who is so excited she must run to announce what all creation longs to say: “I have seen the Lord.”

The congregation responded with the hymn Sing Out, Earth and Skies and the Apostles’ Creed

For Offertory the choir sang Now the Green Blade Riseth, and this familiar hymn landed  deeply in continuing resurrection as creation, "life from buried seed."

After We Eat the Bread of Teaching and Taste and See for Communion we departed with a rousing, full-throated I'm So Glad Jesus Lifted Me. we left as witnesses of the garden restored and where death no longer has the final word.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Service  

April 3, 2025 Tridum Good Fruiday.Tenebrae Service

 

The darkest night

This service is usually better attended at Creator than Maundy Thursday, and this year was no exception. This was true of the services in my youth as well. 

It is easier, I suppose, to get caught up in the drama. There is also a tradition of focused attention on the last words of someone who is dying as if this summarizes a life. 

It makes me think what inscription Jesus might have wanted written, rather than Pilate's as the sign on the cross. Love you? With you? Remember me? Nothing?

This was also another Tenebrae service, like last year. A Tenebrae service features the gradual extinguishing of candles to represent the fading loyalty of the disciples and Christ’s journey into death, culminating in a "strepitus" (loud noise) symbolizing the earthquake/tomb.

Good Friday services are always hard for me. I feel the story is too big. I don’t have words to explain it, and don’t want to explain it. What was accomplished on the cross and in the resurrection? Love somehow sets us free, brings us through our Red Sea crises, breaks our hearts and gives us hope. I do feel the weight of it, wondering how to voice the reality of grief and good news both. 

Yes, we sang our traditional songs and heard the stories from scripture that we have listened to for years. We watched an artist's depiction of Jesus' last words at the beginning of theisservice. The altar was reverently stripped to close the service.  

We left contemplating death and the loss of hope it brings again. 

Rather than an Easter Vigil service, this worship will be our sole preparation for Creator's Easter service.  

Service

April 2, 2926 The Easter Triduum (or Sacred Triduum) Maundy Thursday - Mandatum Novum

Maundy Thursday always begins at the table and never stays there 

Last year I remember Pastor Emillie gave us a poem by a favorite poet of hers, Jan Richardson. It is called Circle of Grace and captures a very particular, special piece of communion that often eludes us, and it is worth talking about on this day when we commemorate that first table. 

 Blessing the Bread, the Cup
Let us bless the bread that gives itself to us
with its terrible weight, its infinite grace.

Let us bless the cup poured out for us
with a love that makes us anew.
Let us gather around these gifts
simply given and deeply blessed.
And let us go bearing the bread, carrying the cup,
laying the table within a hungering world.

Jan Richardson’s blessing names what we are almost afraid to say aloud: the bread comes to us with a terrible weight and an infinite grace. It is not light, sentimental fellowship. It is a costly presence. This is a table already leaning toward the cross.

And yet, year after year in your reflections, what emerges most powerfully is how the table keeps reappearing as more than a ritual of remembering, but as a living, contested space.

At Creator, that space is reclaimed in small, embodied ways: hands offering bread to one another, water poured over tired feet, scripture spoken in many voices instead of one. These are not just liturgical choices; they are theological claims. They say that the commandment, mandatum novum, is not an idea to be admired but an action to be practiced. Love must take on weight. It must kneel. It must touch.

And perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in the question that keeps echoing through all the Maundy Thrusdays I have experienced. Did Jesus wash Judas’ feet?

Scholars can debate the textual history of John’s Gospel, but the deeper question is not historical. For me this question is spiritual. If the love revealed at the table excludes the betrayer, then it is no longer the love that goes to the cross. The logic of Maundy Thursday collapses unless it includes the one who will walk out into the night.

Add to this the basin and towel, which become more than symbols. They become a crisis of recognition. Who is still at the table that I might prefer to exclude?
Whose feet would I quietly pass over?

Because there are other tables being built; louder, more public ones, where the language of faith is fused with power, identity, and exclusion. Bibles wrapped in flags. Accusations hurled in the name of righteousness. Claims of persecution that echo the story of Jesus while bypassing its substance.

Here Maundy Thursday becomes clarifying.

Jesus does not seize power. He does not weaponize scripture or call down judgment; he kneels in service. Most strikingly, he offers no promise of retribution to his followers. Pastor Steve reminded us that victory over enemies comes in renewed fellowship. The risen Christ is recognized not in domination, but in the breaking of bread.

That is the quiet revolution of this night.

It exposes how easily the table can be distorted into a boundary marker, who is in, who is out, who is pure, who is condemned. And it calls the church back to something far more demanding: a table that is carried into a hungering world, not guarded against it.

This is why the stripping of the altar remains such a powerful counterpoint. Everything is taken away, ornament, certainty, even the sense of presence. What remains is absence, vulnerability, and a question: What, of all we have built, truly belongs to the love Jesus commanded?

We are living that question in real time, especially in this season of transition, of calling new leadership, of discerning what to keep and what to release. In that sense, Maundy Thursday is not just a remembrance. It is a diagnosis revealing what is essential.

And perhaps that is where Richardson’s blessing lands most deeply:

Let us go bearing the bread, carrying the cup,
laying the table within a hungering world.

Not defending it. Not branding it, but bearing it as something fragile, costly, and alive. Because the truest sign that we have understood Maundy Thursday is not what happens at the altar. It is whether, when we rise from the table, we are willing to kneel.

Tonight's Maundy Thursday service reminded me of how much Creator worship has changed our worship over the years and what we still bring to services we feel is important. Susan provided beautiful banners behind the altar. Steve  and Claudia brought a pitcher and basin as a visual aid to remember foot washing. Pastor Emillie put together a liturgy meaningful to her and the congregation. Bill added to the reverence of the night with his inspired playing. 

This is a reflection of the love Jesus commanded. 

Service Recording 

March 29, 2026 Palm Sunday 2026 John 12:14-27 Triumphal Entry

What struck me about this Palm Sunday liturgy is not just what was said, but the movement of the soul that was embodied. It journeyed through the arc of John 12: from celebration to surrender, from “Hosanna” to the shadow of the cross.

This was a joyful, festive, and engaging worship. Amy Vanacore played "I will Enter His Gates/He has Made Glad and communicated the true joy in that piece. The acclamation, “Blessed is the one who comes…” placed the congregation inside the crowd of Jesus Christ’s triumphal entry in the Procession. Simultaneously, the language subtly resists triumphalism. 

This was not the victory of the empire. The line “not with the power of empire, but in humility” did theological work here by dismantling expectations. We were invited to confront a paradox: the King arrives not on a warhorse, but on a donkey; ultimately to be crucified.

That paradox intensified through the structure. The palms were raised, symbols of victory, but they were already being reinterpreted.  Not just celebratory branches; they became expressions of participation. We prayed: “May we also…follow Him in the way that leads to eternal life.” In other words, the congregation not only remembered Palm Sunday, but we consented to walk it.

Our Land Acknowledgement in this service grounded this enactment of the cosmic drama in a particular moral reality. We proclaimed implications for justice, history, and our relationship to land. The mention of the Clackamas, Kalapuyan, Molallan, and Upper Chinookan peoples quietly aligned with the earlier claim: this is a kingdom “shaped by justice, mercy, and sacrificial love.” Those gathered collectively refused to separate worship from ethical responsibility.

Lasans Kanneh was another guest musician today that led the congregation in the chorus of Lord, Listen to Your Children Praying while he added powerful, testimonial verses with rich, resonant drumming/ Everything contributed to the heartbeat of the song.

Psalm 24 was especially meaningful. “Lift up your heads, O gates!” becomes more than poetry; it becomes a kind of spiritual architecture. The “gates” felt not only Jerusalem’s gates, but also spoke to our human hearts being lifed. Who can receive this King? Only those with “clean hands and pure hearts.” The liturgy firmly asked: Are you ready for the kind of King who is coming? That question will take us through this coming Holy Week.

And then the Gospel reading turned everything. When Jesus Christ says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies…”, the entire emotional register shifted. Palm Sunday here refused sentimentality. It insisted that glory is inseparable from death, that life comes through loss. This was the theological hinge of the service. The crowd’s enthusiasm is real, but incomplete. Only later, as John says, do they understand.

Lasana performed at this point Blessed Assurance with a steady confidence in what the song proclaims, He always adds to this song and infuses the congregation's vocals with that same rock-steady certainty.  

The Iona Community Creed added another deeply meaningful layer, framing belief not as abstract doctrine but as a lived commitment to a God who "offended many". This is our Palm Sunday belief. We are not simply providing passive admiration, but are actively participating in a disruptive, world-reordering love.

The prayers of the people widen the scope even further. from the individual heart to the entire cosmos. Creation itself is gathered “around the cross.” What began on a dusty road into Jerusalem culminated in something cosmic, nothing less than the healing of all creation.

And then, in the Eucharist, everything converged. He who was welcomed with palms becomes the one who is broken and given. The joyful procession leads, inevitably, to the table, and beyond the table, to the cross.

So the deep meaning of this liturgy is this: It teaches the congregation how to hold two truths at once. This service once again affirmed that the journey does not end at the cross. It continues outward, into the lives of the people.

There is the tension of paradox. Hosanna and death, glory and surrender, the table becomes a place not needing to be resolved but received. The same Jesus Christ who entered Jerusalem in humility now gives himself in humility again. physically and personally.

Then came the final, almost startling turn: Siyahamba – We Are Marching in the Light of God. which Lasana rehearsed the congregation through singing the African lyrics.   

Everything about movement became embodied in a new way. The liturgy began with a procession into Jerusalem; it ends with a procession out into the world. The palms recalled ancient footsteps. The congregation became the crowd, which became a people on the move.

The Sending Song. Siyahamba was not only a reflective hymn; it is a march. It carries echoes of struggle, liberation, and communal hope. In that sense, it answers the earlier theological claim that this kingdom is not one of empire. It is a different kind of movement altogether, one shaped by light, not domination; by shared journey, not imposed power.

The procession that began in Jerusalem never stops. Palm Sunday is always a revelation. The same voices that cry “Blessed is he” are being prepared to follow him into places where blessing looks like loss, where kingship looks like sacrifice, and where, somehow, death opens into resurrection.

And perhaps, most moving, the service insists we are in this story.

 

A History of Palm/Passion Sundays - High Points / Low Points Remembered In One Service

This special post honors the twentieth anniversary of the Creator blog. The first Creator blog post was written on March 29, 2006 Palm Sunday. Click the Holy Week - First Blog link on the right to see the entire 2006 Holy Week's posts.

Creator, like many congregations, often celebrates either Palm or Passion Sunday or Palm/Passion Sunday together on the same day. Palm/Passion Sundays together carry very different tones and purposes. The contrast is intentional, drawing us from celebration into suffering and are the most harrowing in the wild swing of emotions the congregation can experience.

On Palm Sunday celebrations, we lift our palm branches, wave them in the air like a forest bending toward one man. and lay them down reverently when we enter. We cry Hosanna without hesitation, as if we have always known what we meant by it. Palm Sunday is joyous, everything feels clear: God comes near and is recognized. Or at least, we think we do.

We welcome a king, but what kind of king? Is Jesus bringing everyone victory? Is he a restorer of order? Will he take what is broken and make it right in ways we can understand? The palms in our hands are not only symbols of praise; they are also our quiet declarations of expectation. 'Save us', we say, but have already decided what salvation looks like. This is a king like no other, and the truth of what the "Jesus way" offers can suddenly inspire or elude us. We arrive at the Passion Sunday piece.

The tone shifts, and usually the dual liturgy turns. The story deepens. What began in procession becomes confrontation. What sounded like praise begins to echo with accusation. By the time we are in the midst of a dramatic reading of the Passion, we are no longer standing at the roadside. We have been pulled into the crowd. Now we are given lines to speak as the crowd, we call out "Crucify him".

It is unsettling. We do not leave the crowd behind; we become it. The same voices that welcomed now reject. The same mouths that cried Hosanna now form the words of death to the savior. Something within us resists this. We want to step back, to say: That was them, not us. Yet the liturgy suddenly will not allow us that distance.

On Passion Sunday, like Peter, we see how thin the line is between devotion and denial. How quickly love turns when it is not met on its own terms. The palms we carried so lightly that we have strewn across the sanctuary suddenly gain a new, unfamiliar meaning. How easily we follow Jesus until he refuses to be the kind of savior so many hope for.

Today reveals that we are not only those who welcome Christ, but also those who misunderstand him. The triumph we celebrated was real, but in the end, we judged it to be incomplete. It had not yet undergone the required suffering. It did not yet reckon with the cost of the kind of kingdom he promises.

And still, Jesus enters. He does not turn away from the crowd that turns on him. He does not withdraw the gift of himself when it is refused. He continues towards betrayal, towards judgment, and towards the cross.

There is a strange mercy captured in Palm/Passion Sunday. That Christ would accept our praise is one thing. Enduring rejection is another, but that he would hold both together, that he would receive the Hosanna and the Crucify from the same lips and still go on loving that is the mystery at the heart of this day.

Perhaps the only honest prayer left to us is not the triumphant Hosanna we began with, but something quieter, more uncertain:

Lord, save us even from ourselves.

March 22, 2026 John 19:1–16a Participating In A Respectable Silence

In this week's reading, Soren Kierkegaard wrote the most frightening character in the Gospel story is not the mob. It is Pilate acting as the reasonable, respectable man.

The soldiers mock Jesus, pressing a crowned wreath of thorns into his head and draping him in a purple robe. They laugh and strike him. Violence is ugly, but it is at least honest. Brutality rarely pretends to be virtue. Then comes the quieter moment.

Pontius Pilate steps out before the crowd and says something astonishing: “I find no case against him.” Pilate knows the truth as he understands it, and John's gospel makes this unmistakably clear. He questions Jesus. He sees the absurdity of the accusations. He recognizes the envy and fear that animate the priests. He even tries, halfheartedly, to release him.

Yet knowing the truth is not the same as standing in it. Pilate hesitates, and the crowd grows louder. The accusations sharpen. The political pressure closes in. The priests speak the words that reveal the real fear beneath the moment: “If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar.”

Suddenly, the question is no longer about justice but about consequences. Rather than refuse the crowd, or simply not act. Pilate chooses the path that history has repeated countless times: the path of respectable surrender. He simply allows the machinery of power to move forward.

This is the tragedy of the Passion: evil rarely triumphs through monsters alone. It triumphs through the cooperation of ordinary, respectable people who know better.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that the crowd before Pilate is untruth, but the greater danger may perhaps be the individual who dissolves himself into the crowd so that he never has to bear responsibility for what he knows. Pilate represents this temptation by being cautious and politically prudent, and so he becomes the perfect instrument of injustice. He chooses safety.

Yet the Gospel reveals something terrifying: Like Peter in last week's scripture, seeking personal safety becomes betrayal. Pilate sits on the judgment seat to judge Jesus. But in the strange reversal that runs through John’s Gospel, Pilate is being revealed. The one who claims authority is shown to be captive to the fragile stability of his position.

The truth stands before him, bruised and silent. Pilate lets Christ be crucified rather than insisting on his judgment. The question this passage asks must make every reader uncomfortable because it is so close to home. Most of us will not be asked to condemn an innocent man to death, but we will face smaller moments that carry the same shape. What is essentially at stake in these "smaller moments" is rarely clear. We don't have an omniscient narrator to give us a clue as to which way is right,

In those moments, we stand in the shadow of where Pilate stood. The Gospel does not ask whether we recognize the truth. Pilate does recognize innocence as truth. Pilate's dilemma for us would be to move forward with something we don't feel is right because it is easy to follow majority rules. The question actually is whether we will stand with innocence when that standing becomes costly.

For the Passion reveals today's painful paradox: that the greatest crimes in history can often required only one thing from us. 

Our silence.

Pastor Emillie's sermon