In early September (right after Labor Day) an Evening of Orientation to the Confirmation Program at St Matthias will be held. All parents of youth in 6^th through 8^th grades who have not yet participated in confirmation are encouraged to register their children for this very important chapter of their faith journey. We will continue to use the Faith Inkubators program which blends multimedia learning with small group sharing, fellowship and service projects. Register by contacting the church office as soon as possible (859-0639 or belinda@st-matthis.org).

 “Journeying with Jesus:  An Expedition to New Life”

 What is Rally Day?  Rally Day is St. Matthias Lutherans’ annual day to kick-off the new Sunday School year!

 Worship will begin at 10:00 am, followed by a pork BBQ lunch with all the fixings in the Parish Hall (provided by the Learning Committee).  The congregation is asked to bring side dishes and desserts.

 The children will receive a passport for their Journey with Jesus.  They will take their passport to a water fun station and hear about a story that represents that water station and the miracles of Jesus!  So be prepared with your swimsuit and towel while we travel through the stations and hear about Christ’s awesome work!

 Sunday School for all ages will resume on September 5, 2010 at 9:00 am.

⁴⁴Then [Jesus] said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you — that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” ⁴⁵Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, ⁴⁶and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, ⁴⁷and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. ⁴⁸You are witnesses of these things. ⁴⁹And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” ⁵⁰Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. ⁵¹While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. ⁵²And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; ⁵³and they were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:44-53)

As a Lutheran I have probably attended but two or three Ascension Day services. It is typically lifted up in the Roman Catholic and Episcopalian faith communities more than it is in our own. However, I have learned that in Norway, a traditionally Lutheran country, the Day of Ascension is a national holiday.

I’m not sure whether or not the Planning Retreat which our leadership has scheduled for the two days immediately following Ascension Day was done with any awareness or intentionality about the significance of this day, but surely it testament to the presence of the Holy Spirit which intercedes and surprises and assigns holy significance to the otherwise ordinary events of our lives. Jesus departs from his disciples, perhaps in the way that infants are weaned from their bottle – in order that they may grow into the full stature of the one who had birthed them to be a new creation, set apart as a light to the nations. The prayers for Ascension Day include the petition that the Church “will not stand looking up toward heaven, but instead get on with being the body of Christ in the world.” As Luke reports it, the disciples – now Apostles, in light of the commissioning they had been given, continued to meet and bless God in the temple. Then the promised Holy Spirit blew in – into the rooms where they were and into their human hearts – and everything was altogether different. They were now a spirit-filled community, clothed with God’s power, to be witnesses to all that God had done and continues to do in the world. 

Another odd coincidence, if you believe in such shallow things, is that the first day of the anticipated retreat is also the day which the Church has assigned to commemorate the witness of St Matthias, Apostle. According to the church’s introduction for that day, “The lot that “fell on Matthias” was quite a lot. To be not only a follower of Jesus, but an apostle, a ‘sent one,’ is an enormous responsibility. It proved more than Judas Iscariot could bear. In holy baptism we too have been called to follow Jesus; we too have been allotted a share in this ministry. We can take courage, with Matthias, in the words of the Lord quoted by Isaiah: ‘This is the one to whom I will look, to the humble and contrite in spirit, who trembles at my word.’ These are the apostolic prerequisites, and by God’s grace we possess them.”

As I read the history of St Matthias Lutheran Church in Easley, her name was chosen primarily because Matthias was perhaps least known among the apostles, much the way the Lutheran emphasis on  justification by grace through faith seemed to many in this part of the county as a foreign language. Our call is not to make those who have come to the faith in different ways fluent in Lutheran as a second language. Perhaps out call is that WE become more fluent in our Lutheran tongue, modeling repentance, humility, contrition of heart, and the forgiveness of sins, and thereby witnessing to “all these things” that God has made known to us.

Pastor Alan

The wilderness is also the way caretakers of Holden Village, a Lutheran center for renewal, describe their location. Situated in north central Washington State in a remote area of the Cascade Mountains above Lake Chelan, Holden can only be reached by a scenic boat ride from the town of Chelan or from Field’s Point Landing 16 miles up the lake. After disembarking from the ferry, visitors are met by an AWD vehicle to carry them the remaining 11 miles to the village. Intentionally isolated as it is, visitors to Holden find themselves “inconvenienced” by the lack of communication with the outside world – no phones, no television, no cell phone reception and very limited radio reception. Further, “there are no roads connecting to Holden.”

Most of the time, the majority of us have little idea which road, if any, led us into the wildernesses we encounter and endure. If we were conscious of them and where they would take us, we probably would not have chosen to walk down them. The wilderness of our deeply depressed economy; the once beautiful horizon that looked so lovely at twilight today looks more like an abandoned strip mine with the majority of its jobs extracted, a desolate and depressing sight. In Appalachia, when the mines played out or strikes erupted, folks rushed off to the urban centers and began smelting steel and building automobiles. The global reality has changed even that. Or the anxiety and fear which follow an otherwise routine visit to the doctor where we hear things like, “We need to run some more tests.”  Some people seem to cross the street from one type of wilderness to another. Mike Cross once wrote a song he titled “Hard Times,” the refrain to which went, in part, “Hard times, trouble and strife, seen hard times most all of my life. Take away the hard times that I’ve known, and I’ve only lived about a week or so.”

Sometimes we discover our true selves in the wilderness. Perhaps that is the legacy or gift handed on to us by the church during this season of Lent. We walk the narrow way, our focus intentionally narrowed by the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and sacrificial giving. We might add a bit of time for spiritual reading and reflection, participating in a book or bible study or small group discussion. Not that any of these will make the earth move or alter the global economy, but they will, when engaged in prayerfully, change you. And if you are not careful, you just might, “become the change you wish to see in the world.”

When we gather on Wednesday evenings this Lent, you will be welcomed into a quiet, contemplative time of prayer beginning at 6:00 PM. We will sing the church’s ancient evening song from Psalm 141. In the Temple, incense was sprinkled over glowing coals of charcoal thus creating clouds of aromatic smoke as the people chant, “Let my prayer rise before you as incense, the lifting up of the evening sacrifice.”  This liturgical rite symbolized God’s presence calling the people’s memory back to their ancestors sojourn in the wilderness when God, “in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night” went before them leading them into freedom. Our Lenten journey will be one taken through the rough and rugged terrain of the wilderness where we will encounter some of our own demons and temptations on our way to Easter. Oh, and the beautiful liturgy which will enable and guide our prayer at midweek, will be one written for the church by Marty Haugen. We’ve done it before. And get this – it was crafted in the wilderness of Holden Village, where there are no roads.

Together in Faith,

Pastor Alan

It’s February! Ever since 1994 I have been unable to shake the memory of going out into that extraordinarily cold winter morning of February 18. It was snowing, the wind was blowing and the temperature was a brisk 48° below zero not counting wind chill.  My three day sabbatical among the community of Benedictines at Blue Cloud Abbey came as a much needed respite from my internship parish was nearing its end. Many have asked what I could have done so terribly wrong or who I had gotten so angry at me as to warrant such a remote assignment as northeast South Dakota. Actually, though, isolated as it may sound or seem, there are things for which I have come to be genuinely grateful. As I reflect on that deeply meaningful year, there are experiences I had then which nothing the years since have offered to compare. The sense of wonder I felt at the magnificent sight of lambs being birthed in the barn on Vern Schultz’ farm and the agonizing grief and guilt I read on his face when one of them failed to live to its second day. I also gained a new appreciation for coffee as the third Lutheran sacrament, consecrated twice daily by the Britton “Retired and Simply-Tired” coffee club. I recall fondly polishing my Messiah complex up there as I took morning “walks on the water” on those cool winter mornings. And I am grateful for the joy of operating such marvelous machinery such as snow-throwers to clear the sidewalks and driveway. I was recalling those wintery scenes the other night as I watched the movie “Ice Castles.” It is one of Nicole’s favorite films. We played the title cut to the film’s soundtrack, “Looking through the Eyes of Love” at our wedding reception. Lexy’s Dad, Marcus, plowed back the snow from the ice-covered lake there on their Waverly Iowa farm so that she could practice her gift for figure skating.

Looking at that plowed snow scraped from the surface of the lake made me think of how seldom we intentionally delve beneath the surface of our veneer to explore who we really are. The theologian, author and teacher, Marva Dawn, who lives in Vancouver penned a cherished article remains in my “inbox” which is actually the entire top surface of my cluttered desk. In the article titled, “How does contemporary culture yearn for God?” Dawn discusses many of the modern sedatives we use to repress our innate longing for God – that restlessness Augustine sensed is common to humanity until it finds its rest in God. Some of them include the idolatry of ease – the illusion that we can achieve absolute comfort and thus escape any and all suffering. Then she talks about material and experiential consumerism.  Granted our propensity for consumption has been squelched by the economy. Still we remain a people who will “acquire a glittery object to keep for a year” even though that shiny thing may “end up on a poisonous trash pile in Guatemala to be picked apart by sick children to be traded for food.”[i] Then there is the overload of context-less information that overwhelms us precisely because there is very little most of us can do about it except choose a side, join the blog and offer our own commentary. We move faster and know more yet are usually unable to do much about it.

The season of Lent is an invitation to the holy paradox of slowing down in order to see more, feel more, live more deeply, and become more aware of the unceasing presence of God. Our community will enter its practice of this holy time with two days of what may appear as premature “spring cleaning.” Shrove Tuesday (February 16^th) is a day for cleaning of the fat-laden foodstuffs which often coax us to repress our longing for God. Fasting or some lean semblance thereof is a healthy Lenten discipline. The Celtic Appalachian band that calls themselves, “KELLEE” will be with us on Tuesday to enhance the festive  part of our cleaning by helping us to dance the jig and properly plant the exclamation point before Ash Wednesday arrives the next day.

Allow me to share one additional thought, shared with me in a book of reflections entitled, “Memories of Grace.” The author writes,

“Wouldn’t it be a wondrous thing of we could experience everything as grace, believe that there is nothing that is not of God, accept every day as an invitation to leave the shelter of our own minds and see, touch and rejoice in divine life?”[ii]

The Lord be with you.

Pastor Alan

[i] Guthrie, Suzanne. The Holy Ordinary printed in Christian Century, Vol 127, No 1.

[ii] Behrens, James Stephen. Memories of Grace. Chicago: ACTA Publications, 2001. p 42.

We are always living in “in between times.” As Christians we live “already but not yet,” meaning that while our justification has been fully accomplished in Christ, we long nonetheless for God to bring to completion the good work Christ first began in us. Martin Luther once penned these words about the Christian life:

“This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.”

We live in “in between times;” I write this column just five days after members of the US Senate gathered on Christmas Eve morning for the formality of voting on their version of health care reform. There is probably no need to ask whether or not the final version of the bill or its mandates will ever “gleam in glory” if we pause to remember “how laws and sausages are made.” Yet during the process, we are left wondering what will be and how our lives will be impacted by decisions others make on our behalf.

Purveyors of health and wellness related services seem to agree though that in the future, living well and choosing preventative measures related to our health and wellness will be their essential counsel. The ELCA’s Board of Pensions, our own church’s administrator of retirement and insurance plans, has been espousing the adage, “Healthy Leaders Enhance Lives” for some time and has on its website the following words to encourage living well:

“Ultimately, that’s for each of us to decide. Seeking to live well in mind, body and spirit is a personal journey, undertaken for personal reasons. But we also live in community ? together with family and friends, our congregation, our employer, the ELCA. Our state of health impacts the people and organizations around us.”

That last statement, the one about how our own “state of health impacts the people and organizations around us” is what caught my attention. That is because it resonates with the underlying theory behind the Healthy Congregations workshop series we will begin hosting in another week (look for more info in this newsletter or on our website, www.st-matthias.org ). The Healthy Congregations workshop series is based upon the work of The Rev Dr Peter Steinke, a Lutheran pastor who maintained that congregations are more apt to thrive when they are attentive to the emotional processes inherent within the system of congregation life. Steinke based his theories along with the Rabbi Edwin Friedman who examined family systems theory from the perspective of congregational life in his book, Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue on the work of psychologist Murray Bowen in the 1960s.

The workshop on Saturday, January 9^th will not delve deeply into the theoretical yet will focus of some of the practical issues pertinent to family systems theory and what it means to be an intentional community of faith in Christ. The topics on that day will include:

• Healthy congregations accept differences (rather than deny)
• Healthy congregations focus on their strengths (rather than weaknesses)
• Healthy congregations focus on mission (rather than “getting along,” the past, survival, “the minister,” or some other thing or issue)

Just last Sunday, when our worship gathered us for the Service of Lessons and Carols, I made an appeal from the altar that as you busy yourselves in making resolutions for the coming year, that you consider making it a point to be intentional about your spiritual life and the life of this gathered community. A nearby colleague of mine reminded me of the advice from the writer of James, who encouraged the disciples of Jesus to avoid being “double-minded,” yet instead display single-mindedness in their purpose and mission. We have no less than a stellar opportunity before us if we will seize it and seek, prayerfully and faithfully to be the body of Christ as St Matthias church. To heed the words of Eleanor Roosevelt who said, “Do one thing every day that scares you,” may I suggest that you take risks for the sake of Christ in the precious gift of time that will be the year of our Lord, 2010.

Together Faithfully,

 Pastor Alan

Once upon a time, actually more than once, it happened that I was chosen from amongst my peers to serve as chaplain of a particular group or organization. As I reflect on it I’m not sure that I had a whole host of competition for the job, but let me have my fantasy. The first time it happened to me it came as a huge surprise. I wasn’t sure what it meant – so I ran off to talk with my pastor. Then, so that I would have a second opinion, I wandered into a bookstore in the local mall where we liked to hang out. I pulled a book down from one of the shelves entitled, “Prayers,” since they told me that was what it meant to be chaplain – one who prays. I still have that book. In fact I have many books on prayer now. I’ve learned much from others about prayer, including pastors, ancient church fathers, mystics, and ascetics. From them and from my own discipline I’ve learned that time spent in prayer is quality time. It shapes the way we perceive the rest of our day, our world, and our lives. It was Martin Luther who said, “I have so much business [that] I cannot get along without spending three hours daily in prayer.”

I don’t know if there is a right amount of time to spend in prayer. Perhaps what is needed is as individual as we are. But I do know of those for whom a defined sequence of times for prayer punctuates their daily routine. “Ora et labora” is the Latin phrase meaning “prayer and work” which defines, according to the Rule of St Benedict, how religious persons are to live together in community. Prescribed therein is something called the Daily Office which calls the community together for prayer at seven specific hours of the day. When the psalmist said, “Seven times a day have I praised you” (Ps 119:64) St. Benedict believed that the sacred number seven constituted the appropriate number of times to come away from all other things and commit themselves to prayer. I have learned that there are variants in the schedule of daily prayer depending on which community or tradition you inquire. I am mindful of one Benedictine community in the rolling hills of Upstate NY just outside of Elmira that maintained a guest house where I was granted time and space for a Sabbath rest from the parish. Several things I recall about the place include the way meals were taken in silence in the small refectory while the appointed reader for the week nurtured those eating with spiritual reading. Another, and perhaps more profound, was the way that Compline or Night Prayer was concluded. From the Chapel, we were led by the abbot down a flight of stairs into the crypt or undercroft where the Magnificat or Canticle of Mary preceded our blessing and dismissal for the night. You will recall the humble response of Mary when informed by the angel that she had found favor with God and that she would conceive and give birth to a son. Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Following her visit with her cousin Elizabeth who was to give birth to John, Mary’s humility turned to joy and she erupted in song:

“My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; for he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever.” (Luke 1:46-55)

Mary’s young life was punctuated early on by Gabriel’s announcement to her and from then on, humility, prayer, reflection and thanksgiving became the norm for her. In a like manner, our lives tend to look more like run-on sentences apart from the punctuation of God’s presence. My prayer for the faith community of St Matthias is that the light of Christ’s birth will punctuate the darkness of this world and flood your life with hope and the promise of God’s new and dawning day. Pastor Alan

In one of his early books, author Robert Fulghum, shared a little story of the neighborhood children who were playing hide-n-seek in the yard around his house. He recalls the fun of joining in the game as a youth himself. He asked, “Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him?” He went on to tell about the one kid who insisted on hiding so well that the rest would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Eventually that one kid would show back up, mad at everyone else for not playing fair. He would say, “The game is called, ‘Hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP.’” Fulghum shared that memory as he was watching from his little office as the neighborhood kids had descended upon his yard to engage in that age-old ritual. He watched as one kid, reminiscent of the perfect hider from his youth, had buried himself into a pile of freshly raked October leaves.  Eventually, all the other kids had been found and were about to give up on him ever coming back to home base. He wrote, “Finally, I just yelled, ‘GET FOUND, KID!’ out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother.”

Memories are powerful tools for living. In fact, Henri Nouwen writes that “We perceive our world through our memories.” The way we see one another and the world around us depends a great deal on the character and condition of the memories we hold within. In his book, The Living Reminder, Nouwen suggests that much of the suffering we encounter has to do with the suffering of unresolved or unhealed memories that often escape notice and lie concealed beneath our consciousness. He notes that “all of ministry rests on the conviction that nothing, absolutely nothing, in our lives is outside the realm of God’s judgment and mercy.” And further, that by “hiding parts of our story, not only from our own consciousness but also from God’s eye, we claim a divine role for ourselves; we become judges of our own past and limit mercy to our own fears.” Perhaps then it remains those forgotten and hidden memories that continue to wound us and limit us as human beings. Perhaps then it is the prophetic cry within us for trust and grace and mercy – the yearning cry to be found and loved by the one who knows us better than we know ourselves.

We turn the corner on yet another year as we enter the final weeks of the Christian calendar. The days and weeks of November throw at us stark reminders that change is a permanent fixture in our world and as much as may choose to resist it, in our lives also. The leaves will continue their life cycle, maturing in the grandeur of color and ultimately releasing their grip on the branch that so far has been the source of its interdependent life only to fall and give itself completely, yielding to become fertilizer for another year’s growth. We begin our November journey with All Saints’, giving thanks for the faithful ones who remind us that as Christians our identity is defined, not by any of our pious achievements, but by our baptism into Christ – by the truth that we have been found, named, claimed, redeemed by being joined to the death and new life of the resurrected Christ. As we near the end of November, our worship life culminates in celebration of it final goal – that of worshiping Christ as King. It was in a Lutheran confessions class where I began to understand that God is the subject of both the first and last paragraphs of the Bible and even though sin raises its ugly head and stains most of the pages of scripture – in the end, Christ reigns as the Alpha and Omega, the first and last, beginning and end.

The Christian calendar ends and begins again before November is through. We enter the holy season of Advent on November 29, surely my favorite season. In contrast to the fray and noise and rush of that time before Christmas, please consider a few opportunities to come away and rest in God. Brandon Williams, who is a contra-tenor vocal major from Lander will be with us twice – first on November 1^st during worship and again to offer a concert for the Easley community here at St Matthias on November 29^th. Look for more information on the concert (and reception) soon to be published. Also, I am proposing to hold an Advent study entitled, “Advent through the Eyes of Those Who Waited.” It will be held during the 6:00 hour on the four Sundays of Advent (11/29, 12/6, 13, 20). The first session will immediately precede Brandon’s concert and the last three will conclude with a brief form or Evening Prayer together. I look forward to the times we share, gathering for worship, study, conversation. May you find the space and peace within you in the coming days, and may you be assured that God’s love has and will always find a way!

In Christ + Our Life,

Pastor Alan