Decenber 28, 2021 - The 2021 Year in Review - Navigating Our Year in the Wild Web of Relationships

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.” 

This quote from Anaïs Nin's felt appropriate for how many experienced this year. Americans overall in 2021 appeared to experience a historical dislocation that this pandemic sped up and exaggerated. We are definitely not where we used to be culturally and religiously. Yet we cannot quite imagine who we are going to be. 

This year people settled in and adapted those adaptations that had been made the year before. Creator began hybrid worship rather than online worship alone. For Creator the year 2020, like for many churches, was a dramatic disruption of our routines and rituals. The challenges kept us busy. The complications and accommodations for online worship were hard. In 2021 we had to re imagine new ways to adapt worship for hybrid worship. We purchased new technology for the Sanctuary and the Fellowship Hall, Some learned ways that they felt safe to worship in the building. Others this past year only felt safe worshiping from the "zoom balcony", as Bishop Laurie named it.

We finished the "Pandemic Sermons" by Bishop Laurie, synod staff and Bishop Emeritus Dave Brauer-Rieke. Hearing sermons online became routine and our guest pastors and pulpit supply could stream live from anywhere. Hybrid worship brought tough decisions about if and how that practice should continue.  

We found this year that one of Christianity's great strengths may be that it is both subversive and not at the same time - a middle way. And, as Bishop Emeritus Dave pointed out in one of his Pandemic serrmons, Jesus not only walks his talk. He also rocks his walk. This was a beautiful way of saying something more happens with Jesus. Something more than walking his talk. Something beyond living his life by principles he preaches. He helps and heals people and becomes known for this.

Is subversiveness something to be feared or admired? Change can be freeing and frightening. Can we rise to the challenge? Many Americans may have a different response after January 6, 2021. A year later I see the added wisdom of “We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

During the beginning of the year congregational frustrations with one another mounted. By Lent what Arthur C Lichtenberger, a former presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church wrote for Lent seemed appropriate to keep in our hearts and actions: 

Fast from criticism and feast on praise,
Fast from self-pity, and feast on joy.
Fast from ill-temper, and feast on peace.
Fast from resentment, and feast on contentment.
Fast from jealousy, and feast on love.
Fast from pride, and feast on humility.
Fast from selfishness, and feast on service.
Fast from fear, and feast on faith.

Many are aware we are living in times that may become historically significant. We have been distanced not only physically from one another but from many of our rituals and routines. We have been driven to new ways to imagine church. The time and energy to do this can make us feel that the work we have  done is less vital than what we are trying to imagine. It is natural to feel this way. This is a hard yardstick to use when judging ourselves.

As I write this Portland is not snowbound but many families are staying in there homes, not only by the threat of weather but by the omicron variant. This can feel for some like we are living most of life in our homes as cocoons. Pastor Janell's sermon for Transfiguration Sunday this last year described a caterpillar not knowing when to start, and fearful of, building a cocoon. The fear came from the feeling the caterpillar is not itself active in the process of becoming a butterfly. 

Today the cocoon serves as a double metaphor  In our current cocoons of fear, are we in the process of some sort of personal. internal transfiguration without, perhaps, even knowing it? Are we are moving from where we were to new epiphanies about the church? To the hard reality of Lent and the difficult truth that we are dust? Or, perhaps, are we moving towards both and more.

This cocoon metaphor provided a new perspective. Faith must prevail over fear. Confronting something that is terrifying you is extraordinary. And today, unlike scripture, we simply cannot fall back on comforting descriptions of angels or Jesus declaring do not to be afraid. Overcoming human nature must move forward to inspire our imaginations. 

And Jesus, as our Bread of Life, lays bare a Eucharistic relationship I had not considered in the novel way Pastor Janell presented the cocoon idea. This is another way to perceive our God of relationship. We consume God while continuing to be consumed by God through the work that allows the caterpillar to become a butterfly. This mystery does not need to be understood by us any more than a butterfly needs to know how to become the butterfly that eventually emerges from the cocoon. The "caterpillar soup" in the cocoon, needs do nothing more than trust the God-given butterfly process.

This year Pastor Janell preached that Jesus always accepts us, using the metaphor of a caterpillar, cocoon and butterfly to explain. God loves us just as we are with no judgement  Jesus knows God wants everyone to be free, to be a butterfly when we shed the cocoon and Jesus becomes the food that lets us fly. 

Bishop Laurie gave Creator something to think about with her YouTube sermon in October. for World Hunger day. Bishop Laurie addressed Creator directly in a December sermon when she accepted Creator's Ministry Site Profile for the call we will be complete in 2022. The author Diana Butler Bass gave a video summary about the lectionary gospel of Mark that the church followed throughout this year of the pandemic. She preached about Mark, in the end, speaking to a dark harrowing time and a hidden birth narrative I never considered before.

Coming back to the Anaïs Nin quote "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”, I see things differently now than I did at the beginning of the year because of the Worship Journeys, Meditations and Stories I experienced through Creator and the wild web of relationships that we became evermore entangled in during this past year, both as a result of the pandemic and by intention.