Pastor's Notes

Twice I have intentionally worn robes for our online worship: Christmas Eve and Ash Wednesday. On those other occasional times you see me in my liturgical regalia, it has been because either our taping sessions were changed or I had walked right past my online clothing without taking it with me as it hung there by the door as a reminder. 

Not too long ago when my forgetfulness caused another need to dawn the robe, I went to tie the cincture (church word for rope) around the robe and discovered I had forgotten how to tie it. I am of the pragmatic sort and don’t have a fancy way to tie the cincture. Some clergy have a way to make the knot using three twists or the Trinity. Others have a method where the cincture drops into a loop, creating a nice, neat look. Still others have two places…one on the right of the robe, the other on the left, with two knots. Very impressive looking! Me, leaning more to pragmatism and being all thumbs, I prefer any way as long as the cincture doesn’t come apart and fall down during worship. 

Try as I might, I couldn’t remember how to do it. Something I did multiple times on a Sunday, seemed now lost to the past. Eventually I figured it out, but I took this

as an example of how this pandemic has affected so much of life. It has affected so much that was once routine and now seems to be tucked away in some forgotten past.

What “cinctures” might you have? What things of times past that you once did even daily, may have to be relearned? It can be a bit fearful knowing we may have to relearn the already learned as we get back to some resemblance of life as we once knew it.  Will there be former routines at work that will require some thinking once we return to our office, classroom, or place of work? When we see youthful loved ones, will there need to be some re-acquaintance as they have grown and changed in the past year? 

This is, however, the way life has always gone. We study history so we do not repeat its mistakes, yet it seems at times we more than repeat them, we actually seem mired in them. How many times we insist on relearning the already learned!

In Lent we confess more than our sins. Yet our sins are merely a symptom of a much deeper malady. In Lent, what we confess most is the very sinfulness that produces them. Talk about relearning the already learned! Yet in Lent we have the hope that we, mired in sinfulness, need not be stuck in our sins. We are often able to learn from them, repent of them, and move on into a future without them. 

While many avoid the church because of all the hypocrites contained within, we who are within remain in the church because of our constantly confessed hypocrisy. We know we are those who persistently need to relearn what we have already learned. 

We all are aware of 12 step programs. The church and the Christian life is a one step program lived out through a 6 step program. Step one is following Jesus. Steps 1-6 are the cycle of the church year: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week/Easter, Pentecost/Sundays after Pentecost. Each year we repeat. Each year we learn some new things and relearn some old. 

Let your fingers stumble through your cinctures. Go ahead and learn all over what you already knew. Repetition can be a good teacher. It is not just the way of life and the way we make things a part of us, it is a way that God, through the Body of the Christ in which we participate, continues to implant faith and drive out sins as long as we need it; year after year for a lifetime, from Advent to Sundays after Pentecost. It would seem God is okay with teaching us over and over again. 

What makes us who we are? That is the age old question seemingly demanding an answer that comes down on one side of the “nature or nurture” argument. Are we biology or are we psychology? Are we genetic or are we environmental? 

Personally I find this a silly question. Who among us isn’t all of these….and more? Yes, we have Grandma’s eyes, Dad’s temperament, Grandpa’s athleticism, and, somehow, even Aunt Martha’s sardonic wit. From where did we get such?  Despite all this, is there not a part of us that no one in the family present or future seems to have had or have? There is a definite uniqueness to us even as we share biological and psychological material. 

Part of our environment that shapes us is culture. Americans are different than Europeans. The difference travels the range from certain values to how we utilize our knives and forks when eating. 

Okay, so much for the safe stuff. When I said European, you immediately thought of white Europeans, did you not? As I wrote it I did as well, even knowing where I intend to go with this writing. Yet, we know, Europe, like the US is changing racially. The popular street food in Berlin, Germany is a Turkish Doner. New threads are being added into the material that is Europe. Additional color is woven into the fabric that is the US. 

This is threatening to many. It is threatening to many who are white. It is threatening to some of color who have long assimilated into the cultural milieu. New people of any race or land bring change. They always have. Growing up in a town of primarily German ancestry, the ethnic foods I ate in the 50’s and 60’s were pizza, spaghetti, and chilli con carne; hardly food from the Rhineland. 

So far, so good? Allow me to go a bit deeper than carbohydrates and spice and march right into culture and the Christian faith. On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican is a painting of God by Michelangelo. What amazing frescos decorate that ceiling! God in this painting is white. Does this offend you? It may offend some. Yet, for God to be the God of traditional European and Americans there needs to be some understanding, or at least some hope, that God knows something of what it likes to be us. And “us” are shaped by many things; including our cultures. 

So, then, can we not also say, if God is not black, if God is not Asian, if God is not Native American, Arabic, or Latino, etc, God is not fully incarnational? God is not fully one of us and one with us? If part of who we are is determined by our culture, does God need to be somehow one who knows what it is like to inhabit one’s culture?

The first time I ever saw a Jesus who was not white was in an Episcopal church in Lahina, Maui, Hawaii. A colorful mural above the altar had a scene of the nativity. There as dark skinned Polynesians were Mary, and the baby Jesus. Mary was not wearing white or blue but a Ti leaf Hawaiian skirt and a floral lei. 

I had one year of seminary down at this point, and had to think about this painting. I looked around. It was a very diverse congregation gathering that Sunday as one might expect in Hawaii. Manifold races and ages lined up for communion in front of this artwork. The late actor Brian Keith was in the line so the diversity included the famous and the anonymous. 

Regardless of color, this Jesus was for all. Yet each of us have a need for this Jesus to be fully one with us. And, of course, we need to remember the first century Jewish Jesus was not white in our understanding of race. Is your understanding of Jesus broad enough to embrace a Jesus who may look like you and also may look quite different from you? Is mine? 

With Black History month in the rearview mirror, can we carry on some of its learnings into the rest of the 11 months? In Lent can we repent of the belief that somehow we and those like us have sole possession of Jesus…or at least “more” of Jesus? Can we envision a Jesus so expansive that our understanding of grace is both more powerful and more greatly shared?  In our ever-changing culture, can we then turn this understanding into a love for those different from us who are more contributing to than they are taking away from the current culture? Might we be able to lift our sights and wonder what God might be up to in creating this new blend? Or will we hide behind our white Jesus in fear and isolation?  

Wonder about this for Lent. Think about this for Lent. Pray about it. Pray for your response to be a loving response. It seems to me Jesus in any color would will this. This Jesus came to earth to be fully one of us and one with us. While like us, Jesus is yet above us leading us all to a different and better way. Jesus also makes us who we are, but more importantly, who we are becoming. 

Henry Muhlenberg has been called “The Patriarch of the Lutheran Church in America.” Born, raised, and educated in Germany, Henry wanted to be a missionary to India. Instead he was sent as a missionary to Pennsylvania. God has a sense of humor: “So, you really want to be a missionary, eh? Well, we’ll see.”

Upon arrival, Henry did a rather quick assessment of Lutheran churches, then went to work organizing them and connecting congregations and what pastors there were with each other. He helped to establish the Pennsylvania Ministerium in 1748. It was the very first Lutheran body in America. Soon, churches from surrounding states were included in this body. A remnant of this body continued until 1969.

Pastors were few in those days and Henry took it upon himself to mount his trusty steed and visit congregations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia (which then included present day West Virginia), New York, and New Jersey. I preached in one of those churches in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Even with modern interstates it is quite a trek from Muhlenberg’s home in Trappe, a town just outside of Philadelphia. Imagine making the trip by horse often following Indian and game trails!

Often Henry was met with tremendous enthusiasm. Occasionally people wept when being able to receive the bread and wine of communion, have their children baptized, sing hymns, and hear God’s Word preached. There seemed to be literally a great hunger and thirst for Word and Sacrament.  Crowds relative to the size of the local population would gather, often outdoors to take part in worship. Henry would do his thing, then move on to the next locale. Sometimes it was years between visits of Henry or another pastor. 

What, do you suppose, made people so eager, so emotional, so touched by this itinerant pastor’s visits? The time between visits had to be one reason. Yet, as I have gone through this pandemic with you and many others, we may have another thought as to what touched them so. Could it have been their isolation, out on the frontier, often with tremendously socially distanced homesteads?  Remember, in Muhlenberg’s time period, Western Pennsylvania was seen as the West. George Washington, among others, bought land in this wild country thinking that someday people might actually move and live in what was seen as a hostile, wild, and scary place.

What have you missed as we have been apart nearly one year? The first Sunday in Lent of 2020 was the last in person worship in our sanctuary. Have you missed Holy Communion? Communal singing? Our fine choir and musicians in person where we can see their smiles as they inspire us with their singing? Do you miss Aiko’s warm smile as she plays and leads our music? Do you miss guests who seek us out? I know what you miss, perhaps most: the gathered community; people. We all know the children’s ditty, “This is the church, this is the steeple, open the door and see all the people!” It rightly expresses that for the church to be the church at its best, it needs people and it needs them together. No, we have not “closed the church.” The church remains open however differently it now operates. Yet it is not the same. 

The people of Muhlenberg’s day eventually were able to build church buildings, call pastors, and worship as they had known before “back east” or in their former countries in Europe. No doubt they did so well they were able to establish Sunday routines and eventually even take some of it all for granted at times as though this was how it had always been. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to once again have such routine and be able to take it all for granted? Maybe, just maybe, a small gift of the pandemic to us has been to give us a jolt out of complacency and routine. Maybe part of that gift can be to realize in our minds and hearts that what we often see as routine and ordinary, can be quite extraordinary in their ability to help us become the person who God created us to be even when we don’t even notice this might be happening. 

The time of being together again will come. In the meantime, it is more than okay to miss those former habits and long for their return. It is okay to have ups and downs, joys and struggles. Like Henry Muhlenberg and his horse, making the rounds, and returning from time to time to be among God’s people, God keeps plodding on refusing to let a pandemic come between God and God’s people. (And good ol’ Henry, apparently did want to become a missionary.)

(As an aside: Two of Henry’s sons, both pastors, had key roles in our nation’s birth. Son Peter became a Major General in the Continental Army and was an aide to George Washington. Later he was a congressman in the US House of Representatives. There is a monument to Peter in Washington, DC. It was sculpted by one of his descendants.  Following the adoption of the US Constitution, son Frederick, also a congressman, became the very first Speaker of the House for the newly formed United States House of Representatives)