Speaking of Grace

Readings:

Listen to the audio from Pastor Wendell Hendershott’s sermon on February 28, 2010:

Our newsletter, Grace Gatherings, for March 2010 has been published. You may access it as a PDF file by clicking here.

Triduum [pronounced TRIH-dee-oom] translates literally: “three-days.” Never heard of it before? You’re not alone. It refers to the three great days of Easter: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Vigil. The idea of these three days is that the church spends three whole days in prayer. Of course, these days, most people can’t imagine even three whole minutes in prayer, let alone three days.

If however, we remind ourselves that prayer is a multi-tasking endeavor, we are in a much better mindset to enter onto such a path. A very wise teacher once reminded my Sunday School Assembly that we could pray anywhere, any time, no matter what else we were doing. Why, we could even pray when we were making our beds in the morning or at school before a test.  (That’s also why I know that as long as there are math tests, there will always be prayer in the public schools.)

The services of these Three Days of the Triduum are the focal points of our final Lenten prayers. During the time between the services we’ll go about our regular activities, but, it is to be hoped, with a renewed attitude of reverence and prayer.  Perhaps even with a sense of Christian purpose to love our neighbor and our God in a heartfelt way.

So this year, as we did last year, we will encourage you to join us in prayer for the duration of the Triduum. On Maundy Thursday we center our prayers around Jesus’ new command to love one another. To aid our prayer we will celebrate the Eucharist which Jesus instituted that first Thursday. On Good Friday we will center our prayers around Christ’s great sacrifice of love for the whole world. To aid our prayer that night, we will proclaim the mystery of Christ’s Passion. Saturday, we will center our prayers around baptism. To aid our prayers the night before Easter, we will participate in one of the most ancient liturgies of the church, celebrating with fire, word, water, bread and wine. It is the most holy night of the whole year, even more holy than Christmas.

These days of the Triduum, April 1, 2 & 3, this year, will lead us straight to Easter.  We will be on pilgrimage. We will wander through the wilderness. We will tell the most wondrous stories of our faith. We will laugh and cry and sing. We will wonder and pause and reflect. We will celebrate God’s love for us and we will rejoice in the good news of God’s mercy and love for all humanity.

Pastor Wendell Hendershott

Northwesterners often get stereotyped as nature lovers. Having spent eleven years of my life in western Washington and Oregon prior to our most recent move to Corvallis (after a hiatus in the not-quite-as-NW-state of Idaho), I must admit there is some reasoning behind such stereotyping. While I’ve spent most of my life either in Western or Northwestern parts of the United States, I have spent lesser years in the South and Midwest. From my experience, the impressiveness of nature is certainly magnified in the West and Northwest. Often it’s those who have lived other places who are most impressed with the spectacular scenery found in the West and NW. While living in Idaho we once had friends visit from Michigan. Our friend, Jim, could not stop talking about how awed he was with the scenery around us. I then realized I had begun to start taking such scenery for granted.

Given our access to the natural beauty of forest, mountains, and ocean, it’s not a surprise that many Northwesterners do tend to be nature lovers. It might even be said that some worship nature. The technical term for a religion based on nature worship is pantheism. Such a tendency is to worship the creation to the exclusion of the creator. It’s the worship of what has been made without acknowledging the one who made it. It’s an unfortunate disconnect in the same way that laborers often are disassociated from the services they provide i.e., parents disassociated from providing food, clean clothes, and monetary support or farmers and field workers disassociated from growing food bought in fancy packaging in grocery stores. Such a disconnect leads to separation from meaningful relationship. Such a disconnected one sees certain things but fails to see how such things relate to something larger to which that one itself is intricately connected.

While, based on my understanding of God, I would not encourage one to worship nature, I would encourage one to love and respect nature. I would also say that the natural world reflects aspects of the nature of God. Just as it’s difficult for any of us to create something — whether it be pottery, poetry, a painting, a quilt, or a wood carving — without putting something of ourselves into it, our creator God cannot be separated from creation itself. The idea of God being reflected through creation is often spoken of these days as panentheism (God in all). Many Christians speak of the web of creation being similar to an all encompassing ecosystem where everything impacts everything else because all is connected in a giant web of life whose source is the author of life, God. The movement within one small strand of the web is felt by the whole.

Based on my viewing of this year’s hit movie, Avatar, I would say that its creator, James Cameron, wished to convey the interconnectedness of all life in his creation of the fantasy world, Pandora. All emanates from and returns back to the Pandoran deity, Ey’wa (a mixed up pronunciation of Yahweh, the Old Testament reference for God). Cameron’s screenplay is a very panentheistic portrayal of a God of Cameron’s making. Movies, literature, pop culture inventions, folk art and fine art all have the potential to teach us truths which point us towards the true God. They can also mislead us to worship a piece of creation in a way that is disconnected from our Creator God.

As Christians we are given a spirit of discernment, wisdom embodied within and passed on through evolving tradition, and living, sacred scripture by which to distinguish truth from fiction, the true God from false gods. We do not arrive at truth by ourselves or in a vacuum. We need one another. We need the gift of the Holy Spirit.  We need the Church. As imperfect as it is, the Church contains Christ’s body on earth. Equipped with all these things, not only can we love and enjoy nature, but we are led to the care of the earth rather than its exploitation. So, love nature and talk about how nature, your favorite movies, books, etc. lead you to the love and worship of the true God. By this we will all be enriched.

From one NW nature lover to another,
Pastor Netsie

Pastor Lee Kluth, from Pacific Lutheran University, visited Grace and participated in worship.

Pastor Lee Kluth

Listen to the audio from Pastor Lee Kluth’s sermon on February 21, 2010:

       Notice the parament on the altar in this picture.

Note: this year we are using Prayer Around the Cross for our Lenten Worship Services.

               Prayer Around the Cross is a meaningful devotional prayer service that was originally developed at Holden Village. Holden is an intergenerational retreat next to the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area in Washington State. It is a contemplative service filled with music, scripture and silence. It stems from the ancient and emerging worship movement with a Post-Modern component. It is sort of Holden’s response to Taize’ style worship. We will have a variation of this service here at Grace this Lent.

                As we will practice it here at Grace this Lent we will have a large cross lying longitudinally in the sanctuary as the center focus of our worship. Rather than sit in pews the whole service, we will encourage those gathered to move from station to station in the worship area. There will be several interactive stations around the cross. Some will have a worship assistant to aid the worshippers at that station. Others will be areas that are more or less devotional areas of solitude with devotional aides. Some stations will remain the same each week, such as the opportunity to light a candle and place it at the cross and the station for healing prayer. Others will change, for instance the station for ashes will only be available on Ash Wednesday, the station with icons will have a different icon each week.

                During the worship time we will have times of music, times of scripture readings, and times of silence. The times of music will have not only congregational singing, but also solos and ensembles. The scripture readings will be both silent by the worshippers and aloud by a lector. Some of the times of silence will have suggestions for devotion and others will be left to the thoughts and concerns of the worshippers.

                We hope those who come will find these Lenten services meaningful and engaging.  We will design this worship to have a variety of opportunities for all ages. There will be stations that are designed just with children in mind. At the same time, there will be stations that adults will find spiritually and intellectually stimulating. Our focus throughout Lent will be on the cross of Christ and God’s redeeming love for the world.

Readings:

Listen to the audio from Pastor Netsie Griffith’s sermon on February 14, 2010:

Readings:

Listen to the audio from Pastor Wendell Hendershott’s sermon on February 7, 2010:

Lengthening

Lent means many things to different people. The word “Lent” comes from the same root as we also get “lengthen.” It refers to the lengthening of the days of spring.  I like to think of it in terms how we might lengthen or extend our understanding of our Baptismal promises.

When we were baptized we not only received all the promises of God, but also made promises of our own to fulfill. They were either made by ourselves or by our parents.  If they were made by our parents then we affirmed them as our own at confirmation.  The promises God makes with us as we are baptized are to liberate us from sin, death and the power of the evil one, to join us to and integrate us into the people of God, to secure us in faith with the power of the Holying Spirit, to mark our lives with the sign of the cross, to inaugurate our servant mission in this world as God’s priestly people working on behalf of others and to reshape our lives to the form of God’s will for us. These are powerful promises and life-changing actions that keep us in the faith.

At the same time, we make incredible promises to God in our baptisms. Though it has been expressed differently at various times in our history as Lutherans, we promise to live among God’s faithful  people, to hear the word of God and share in the Lord’s supper, to proclaim the good news of God in Christ through word and deed, to serve all people, following the example of Jesus, and to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.

Though we embrace these promises all through the year, Lent becomes the time we focus in on the promises of baptism, both the promises God makes to us and those we make to God. We receive the promise of God as grace-filled assertions of good news for us and the world. We look to the promises we make in baptism as expressions of our love for God and for our neighbor, not only living out God’s commandments, but going beyond them to the ethics of the scripture in such places as the Sermon on the Mount and the other teachings of Jesus, the apostles and the prophets.

Lent is a time of contemplation, not only on how we are doing in these endeavors, but also on how God is doing on God’s part as well. It is much more than a time to examine our sinfulness, it is also a time to celebrate the gifts of God’s grace and mercy.  While we inevitably fail to dot every “i” and cross every “t,” and sometimes worse, in our attempts to fulfill our end of the baptismal promises, God never misses a single opportunity to fulfill the promises on the other end. The scriptures tell us that God’s steadfast love is from everlasting to everlasting, and God’s mercies are new every morning, that not one of the promises God has made has failed, that every one of the promises of God is a “yes,”.

So lift your drooping hands this Lent. Make strong your weak knees. Keep to the straight path of your Lenten journey. Pursue peace with all. Let mutual love continue.  Be an example of Goodly living so that others may be encouraged by your deeds.  See to it that others are so inspired by who you are that they too will want to be just like you.  And when you fail to live up to these things, as you will, rest in the steadfast love, grace and mercy of our God whose promises will sustain and keep us.

Pastor Wendell Hendershott