Keeping company with CS Lewis this week, as he writes about his struggle to give himself fully in trust to God. Can you relate?

"I say my prayers, I read a book of devotion, I prepare for, or receive, the Sacrament.  But while I do these things, there is, so to speak, a voice inside me that urges caution.  It tells me to be careful, to keep my head, not to go too far, not to burn my boats.  I come into the presence of God with a great fear lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerably inconvenient when I have come out again into my ‘ordinary’ life.  I don’t want to be carried away into any resolution which I shall afterwards regret.  
 
For I know I shall be feeling quite different after breakfast; I don’t want anything to happen to me at the altar which will run up too big a bill to pay then.…The root principle of all these precautions is the same: to guard the things temporal.…This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.…
 
For it is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves.…For He has, in the last resort, nothing to give us but Himself; and He can give that only insofar as our self-affirming will retires and makes room for Him in our souls.  Let us make up our minds to it; there will be nothing ‘of our own’ left over to live on, no ‘ordinary’ life.…What cannot be admired—what must only exist as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy—is the idea of something that is ‘our own,’ some area in which we are to be ‘out of school,’ on which God has no claim.  For He claims all, because He is love and must bless.  He cannot bless us unless He has us.  When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.  Therefore, in love, He claims all.  There’s no bargaining with Him."                                  

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world. It is time, in the power of the Spirit, to take up our proper role, our fully human role, as agents, heralds and stewards of the new day that is dawning. That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.     

N.T. Wright   Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

Because  we know all of this to be true, this week let us pray these words from Ephesians 3:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Maybe many of you have had the same feeling at the beginning of a new year-- lots of intention to reboot, face into the fresh month/year/decade with energy and action! That hasn't quite happened for me yet in the manner I had hoped. We stand upon the verge of the unknown. In some ways, there lies before us a new year and we are going forth to possess it and bring it into being. At the same time, we rely upon the Lord to bring us what He will, as we walk with Him and trust His love and good provision.

All our supply is to come from the Lord. Here are springs that never run dry; here are fountains and streams that shall never be cut off. Here is the gracious pledge of our Good Father-- if He be the source of our mercies, they can never fail us. 

How might we pray together as a church family to this generous God of love? Perhaps this prayer from Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is a good start:

Disturb us, O Lord

when we are too well-pleased with ourselves 
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, 
because we sailed too close to the shore.
​
Stir us, O Lord
to dare more boldly, to venture into wider seas 
where storms show Thy mastery, 
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.
In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes and invited us to follow. This we ask in the name of our Captain, Jesus Christ. 

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

It’s always important to know where you are going…if possible! But Thomas, the friend of Jesus, poses my question: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (Jn.14:5). I am one who is on the journey, but often I am confused or just in the dark about a way forward. Jesus refers his closest friends back to their journey with him already: “I am the way,” he says. It became a cliché several years back to ask one’s self “What would Jesus do?” But, in many ways we know how to go forward because we have already learned what is important. Jesus taught love, forgiveness, inclusiveness, kindness and compassion. None of those steps or actions can be the wrong steps, no matter where we find ourselves.

And he also promised that his close friends would experience the Spirit living within them, reminding them of the ways of love. Think of the Holy Spirit as a spiritual GPS in our travels, giving us course correction, reminding us to back up and turn around, telling when we have taken a wrong route. I have experienced that GPS within me, making itself known in sacred reading, in quiet prayer, in conversation with others. It is a source of creative energy, a fountain which produces ideas that seem to come from nowhere, about how to love, when to be quiet, and ways to think outside the box about knotty problems. Signs abound in my life with the Spirit lens with which to view them, and they lead me onward. 

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Magi

         “Where is the child who has been born
         king of the Jews?
         For we observed his star at its rising,
         and have come to pay him homage.”
                           —Matthew 2.2

Magi captained by a star, lured by love,
consult Herod possessed by fear
to find a young woman courted by grace
who has given birth to a boy
compelled by Holy Spirit.

(Herod, obsessed by rage, will hunt for the boy
but only for himself,
and so die hungering.)

Magi reeled by love
seek no glittering else.
Attentive, undeterred, persistent,
the star no mere sign but a magnet,
they will find the way,
and find another way.

Oh, to be so haunted.

__________________
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Yes- oh to be so haunted!

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

"The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14

In the incarnation - God becoming human and dwelling among us - God made it possible that through the Word, Jesus, we would be able to see His glory. Colossians tells us that Jesus is "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). Hebrews tells us "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being..." (Hebrews 1:3). Jesus reveals God's glory. 

The word glory is used in the Bible to denote the visible manifestation of God's presence. It is the sum of all His attributes and perfection. In the Old Testament God's glory dwelt in the tabernacle. In the New Testament God's glory dwells among His people embodied in the person of Jesus. His presence is always with us. He is the glory of God!

At His birth the angels sang,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven,  and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” Luke 2:14

Glory to God in the highest, Glory to God evermore
Good news, great joy for all
Melody breaks through the silence
Christ, the Savior is born!
Jesus, the love song of God!

Christ Tomlin - Midnight Clear (Love Song) 

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

"It was thousands of years ago and thousands of miles away, but it is a visit that for all our madness and cynicism and indifference and despair we have never quite forgotten. The oxen in their stalls. The smell of hay. The shepherds standing around. That child and that place are somehow the closest of all close encounters, the one we are closest to, the one that brings us closest to something that cannot be told in any other way. This story that faith tells in the fairytale language of faith is not just that God is, which God knows is a lot to swallow in itself much of the time, but that God comes. Comes here. 'In great humility.' There is nothing much humbler than being born: naked, totally helpless, not much bigger than a loaf of bread. But with righteousness and faithfulness the girdle of his loins. And to us came. For us came. Is it true—not just the way fairytales are true but as the truest of all truths? Almighty God, are you true?
When you are standing up to your neck in darkness, how do you say yes to that question? You say yes, I suppose, the only way faith can ever say it if it is honest with itself. You say yes with your fingers crossed. You say it with your heart in your mouth. Maybe that way we can say yes. He visited us.
The world has never been quite the same since. It is still a very dark world, in some ways darker than ever before, but the darkness is different because he keeps getting born into it. The threat of holocaust. The threat of poisoning the earth and sea and air. The threat of our own deaths. The broken marriage. The child in pain. The lost chance. Anyone who has ever known him has known him perhaps better in the dark than anywhere else because it is in the dark where he seems to visit most often."      
Frederick Buechner  The Clown in the Belfry

God is. God comes here.

Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

…wealth and cleverness were nothing to God — no one is too unimportant to be His friend.
Dorothy Sayers from The Man Born to be King

No one can celebrate a genuine Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who, because they have everything, look down on others, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. 
Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.
Oscar Romero
 
No one wants to admit to being needy.  It is, after all, allowing someone else to have strength and power to deliver what one is desperate for. 

Relinquishing that control is painful but it is more painful to be so poor that one is hungry without food, thirsty without drink, ill without medicine, cold without shelter, alone without God.
When we are well fed and hydrated, healed, clothed and safe in our homes, it is difficult to be considered “needy”.  Yet most of us are ultimately bereft and spiritually impoverished; we need God even when we can’t admit our emptiness, or we turn away when He offers Himself up to us.
Despite the wealth with which we surround ourselves every day, our need is still overwhelmingly great; in Advent, we stand empty and ready to be filled with his abundant and lavish gift of Himself. 
 
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation

Advent historically splits our vision into two focal points in time: the first coming of Christ in the manger and His second coming in glory. For some reason, this dual vision unsettles me. And, it’s probably supposed to, in the wisdom of our forbearers who established the liturgical calendar for the church. We are not allowed to only rejoice in the tiny baby in the manger, but we must grapple with the reality that this is also the one who died and rose again and will come again to judge both the quick and the dead. Here are some implications I’ve been thinking of for our daily life:
 
– Focusing on both comings of Christ makes everything significant.
– Focusing on both comings of Christ means that humility and glory are held tightly together.
– Lastly, focusing on both comings of Christ gives hope in our waiting.
 
As we wait in between the times, during this Advent, may we feel the pressure of Christ’s humility at our backs, crushing our resistance to washing feet, serving others, loving when we are exhausted. And here, too, as we face forward, we believe in the glory of Christ to come and we believe that imitating Christ in his suffering will be worth it in view of an “eternal weight of glory.” We are hemmed in by humility and glory.
 
Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson
Pastor for Spiritual Formation