Andrea

I’ve been thinking this week about the ‘cloud of witnesses’ who have been part of my life, and the life of this church, over the past decades. So many beloved friends and family members who have died, but are still with me in an almost tangible way. And I’ve been feeling very grateful.

Friends, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about silence lately – and wrestling with my yearning for it at a time when silencing seems to be the objective of so many authoritarian powers. Like most things, silence isn’t good or bad in and of itself. It can be both generative and destructive, both holy and sinful.

Over the past several Sundays, I’ve been intrigued and inspired by the challenging Jesus we’ve encountered in Luke’s gospel. The Jesus who says he didn’t come to bring peace, but division (Luke 12:51). The rule-breaking Jesus (Luke 13:14-16). The order flipping, imagination-stirring Jesus (Luke 14:13-14).

This week, we’ll spend more time with the Jesus who refuses to be tamed – the Jesus who believes the power of love, the power of kindness, the power of drawing the circle wider and treating people’s needs as holy – can overcome even the most entrenched systems of exclusion.

Friends, Summer is peak travel season, and that’s no exception for the pastoral team here at St. Paul & St. Andrew. Pastor K is wrapping up a 150+ mile trek across Ireland this week; I’ve just returned from a (much less ambitious!) trip to Michigan; and Pastor Lea is heading out on her own journey in the coming days.

As we move into the last Sunday of Easter season, we mark the ascension of Jesus. I like to think of the Ascension as the ending that was the beginning of the becoming of the church. It was the ending that had to happen for the Holy Spirit to descend upon the apostles and the church to be bon on Pentecost (which we’ll celebrate together next Sunday).

Lent and Holy Week and Easter came and went. Here we are, in Eastertide, a season of 50 days where we continue to celebrate the hope found in that glimpse of the possibility of resurrection that Easter offers, and where we face the challenge of what that means for our lives, for the everydayness that once again takes over when the celebration of the extraordinary ends and the world itself doesn’t feel any different at all. When evil remains real and tangible and visible.

This Sunday, we enter Holy Week with Palm Sunday worship. Interestingly, this year’s Palm Sunday lectionary text comes from the Gospel of Luke, whose telling of the Palm Sunday story includes not a single waving palm.

Birth pangs are a frequently used motif in the apocalyptic imagery that was common in Jesus’s Jewish tradition. As someone who physically birthed two humans from my womb, I know a thing or two about birth pangs. One of the things I learned through my labor and delivery experiences is that fear-based resistance intensifies pain and draws out the process in dangerous and unhealthy ways.
We’ve been talking and singing about the importance of resistance, of holy resistance, in recent days.

As I’ve been prepping for Sunday, my brain keeps transporting me back to the Intermediate Hebrew class I took during seminary. Perhaps a strange place to be, since we aren’t working with any Hebrew Bible texts this week?