Author: Communications

A taste! When it comes to reality, that’s all we get, is a taste. We only have five senses. I’m sorry, but given the size and breadth and complexity of the universe, that’s not enough to experience all of reality. Even those five senses are limited in their capacity to a minute fraction of the range or realm of that sense. For example, our eyes are able to detect only a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, what we call visible light. Every sense we have has only a limited range within which it operates.

Stop and smell the roses, and then realize that what you are smelling in that single moment is one billionth of the mesmerizing fragrances that are in the air. You are sampling only a mere fraction of reality at that place and time.

We are limited to five senses. Consider the cosmos! Think about the extent and diversity of life on the earth, then consider the seemingly infinite universe, filled with galaxies, stars, and planets. Only five senses!

Animals that we consider inferior or less developed than us (I think that is every animal!) have senses that we don’t have. Birds and bats and other animals (even sea urchins!) have the ability to navigate by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field. Dolphins and whales and bats can use a kind of sonar to detect objects they can’t see with their eyes. Fish can sense pressure waves and vibrations in the water through their lateral line to detect prey or predators or other water movements.

Not only are we lacking in full sensory capabilities, but our processing ability is limited. As sophisticated as our minds are, they are lazy and use dualisms (either/or rather than both/and) and categorization methods (stereotypes, generalizations) as short cuts in order to cut down on analytical time and delays in decision making. These dualistic and categorization methods lead to biases and prejudices that harm our relationships and prevent us from appreciating the true diversity and intelligence inherent throughout the human species and all living things.

We sample only a taste of what is real. We don’t have the human ability to sense all of what God has created. But after our physical life, in heaven, we will have full sensory capabilities to perceive all of reality. And we will be amazed and awed by it all, incredulous at what we thought was reality, to find out that it was a drop in the ocean of reality.

Stop and smell–and taste and see and hear and touch the universe–and realize that what we are missing is as real as what we perceive, and it is more amazing and beautiful than we can conceive, and give praise to the Creator of it All.

Your Lay Leader,
Doug

from our Lay Leader

Think of religion as how you deal with reality. It’s about how you relate to everything around you. It’s what governs your way of living. Everyone has a religion. Everyone has a god or an idol that they live for or give themselves to. For those that don’t think they have a religion, their god is themselves. They worship themselves and live for themselves. Many of us start out that way. But at some point, most people become disillusioned with being god and look for something bigger than themselves, something they can be a part of, a group they can belong to. Belonging is an innate need of human beings.

Human beings have spent millions of years trying to figure out how to best live in this world and have passed their knowledge along, generation by generation. We don’t have to figure out from scratch how to live wisely. We can benefit from the perennial traditions that have been tested and proven true throughout human history. These have yielded about 6 major religions that have much in common, although followers of each tend to focus on their differences.

Being a Christian is more a way of life than a system of beliefs. In fact, this could be said about all religions. Instead of calling them beliefs, if we consider them a framework of our understanding of the universe and our place and role in it.

These are some of my understandings:

In the scale of time and space, I am a very small part of the universe.

The beauty of all things convinces me that there is a Creator who made these things out of love.

Indeed, love is the connecting force of all things.

It is my discovery of the love of God that compels me to live with love as my core motivator, wanting to love others and love all things as much as God loves me.

Most people who profess to be a member of a major religion, including myself, have failed to love others as God loves us, and therefore, most people have a negative view of religion, because they see the practitioners of these religions living in very unloving ways.

I believe that God came into the world in human form to show us how we behave in unloving ways and more importantly, to show us how to live a life of love as He intended. Somehow that got translated into the belief that if a person simply accepts that God died a human death and was resurrected that we are saved from eternal death no matter how unloving we might be. It’s like believing that Jesus died in your place and you received a get-out-of-jail-free card. It misses the main point that Jesus clearly said, “If anyone wants to follow me, he must let go of his self-importance, and do what I have been doing, which is putting others before myself, even to the point of dying” (this is my paraphrase of Luke 9:23).

It doesn’t take much intelligence or effort to look around and see that most people behave in very selfish ways, even people who appear very loving at times. The reason for conflicts, fighting, violence, abuse, oppression, hatred, prejudice, and discrimination is that people pursue their own ambitions and interests, not those of others, which is the opposite of what Jesus taught and showed us (Matthew 16:24, Luke 6:30-31).

The first thing on my morning ritual is to brew a half a pot of coffee for my wife and I. I usually get up when it is still dark and make my way down the stairs in the darkness and turn on a light in the kitchen. But this morning when the light came on, the glass coffee carafe was not sitting on the coffeemaker. So I looked on the counter, the kitchen island, the kitchen table. No coffee pot. So I started looking in some other likely locations where I have found the coffee pot before: in the dishwasher, in the refrigerator, on the hutch. Nothing. I was a bit perplexed, so I started thinking of other places to look.

I remembered that yesterday morning I had done something unusual. I had taken the coffee pot to my wife’s bedside to refill her cup. Yes, I thought, it must still be in the bedroom. I quietly sneaked into the dark bedroom with my flashlight and swept it across the bedside table and the rest of the room while my wife slept. No coffee carafe. So I went back downstairs and began a more thorough search, looking on the dining room table, the sideboard, the family room coffee table (of course!). Nothing!

Now I was flummoxed. I began to look in some unlikely places: on top of the refrigerator, in the oven, in the microwave, in the foyer, then the laundry room and the bathroom. Hmmmff! I looked on the back porch, the front porch, the sewing room, all the bedrooms. I went back to the master bedroom not once more, but twice more, the last place I was sure I had seen it, searching on the floor, sweeping the whole room with the brilliant white LED light from my smartphone, no longer concerned about waking up my wife—she might know where the darned pot is! But she continued to snore lightly.

Finally, I gave up, and made a single cup of coffee by boiling water and pouring it over a filter containing ground coffee. I decided to continue with my morning routine, so I sat down with my cup of coffee and recited some of my favorite psalms and then sat for 20 minutes in Centering Prayer. After letting my frustration go and resting in God, surely I’ll think of some place I didn’t look for the glass carafe. It will show up somewhere.

Each Sunday, our pastor asks us before leading us in prayer, “Where have you seen God in your life this past week?” How far do you look to find God in your life? How important is it to you to see where God has been making an appearance? Are you like I was with the missing coffee carafe? Intent on finding God, even if you have to look in some unusual places? Willing to persevere in the hunt for Him in order to get that jolt you need to start your day?

It’s pretty easy to give up looking if God doesn’t play a critical role in your life. Your response might be, “I didn’t see God in my routines this past week. I’ll just wait and see if He shows up next week.”

Where are you looking for God? Are you just looking in the usual places? In the worship service, in the sermon or the liturgy, in the anthem or scripture? Maybe in your neighbor’s newborn baby, that beautiful face, those tiny perfect fingers? Maybe in answered prayer, the doctor’s original diagnosis was in error, there’s nothing to be concerned about?

Do you tend to look for God only in church, in prayer, or in miracles—and stop there? Or do you look in some unlikely places? Is God showing up in your conversation with the grocery store clerk? Do you see God in the mushroom that appeared in your yard one morning? Do you see God in your remembrance of someone you haven’t thought about in years? Do you see God in the person speeding past you through the traffic light that just turned red?

Where you see God in your life depends on where you look and where you expect to see Him. I say a prayer most mornings that I learned from someone else. It goes like this: “Father, I offer to you this day all my prayers, my works, my joys, and my sufferings. Let me accept without question and respond lovingly to every situation of this day as truly sent by you.” Every situation!

God was present when I couldn’t find the coffee pot. I don’t believe that Gods orchestrates every element of our lived experience, but I think He is present in them, and He observes how we react in every situation. Do we respond lovingly? Do we respond like Christ? Do we consider how God might be using a particular situation in our day to draw you to Him, to teach you, to love you, to guide you? God used a missing coffee pot to get my attention, to get me to think about how much effort I put into finding that pot, and to consider how persistently and thoroughly I look for His presence and actions in my life.

I hope that you devote more time looking for and contemplating God’s presence in your life, and that you don’t stop at all the usual places, but that you begin to find Him in some pretty unusual places that open your eyes to the possibilities of His presence in everything. And how he may be using, not one situation, but any and all situations to mold you into His carefully crafted creation.

So what about the missing coffee carafe? I’m still looking for it…but it’s only 7:45 am, so I still have lots of situations in the day ahead, where God will certainly show me some new things. If only I expect to see Him.

In the message I preached a few weeks ago, I spoke about how practical our faith is. And I believe it really is practical. But as I meditated about this, I thought about how we might think of practicality as the same as rationality. And rationality is not faith. In some ways, the reason we need faith, is that our rational brains are limited and God does not want us to be limited by them. He wants us to have full life, a life that goes beyond that which our mind can imagine, a life that is bigger than ourselves, a life that expands to the full potential that He has given us and wants for us.

Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” He was telling the people of that time and us alive today that we are not to settle for a one-dimensional life, that the life God intended is a multi-dimensional, full color extravaganza!

Almost every lesson that Jesus taught stood the conventional thought on its head. The world still hasn’t accepted His radical propositions, and that’s why we are still challenged in our church-think today. Because we as God’s children are destined for a life that is inconceivable to the worldly rational mind. And that destiny is not just in the afterlife; it is here and now in our day-to-day lives. We are destined to live fully activated, God-filled, lives, if we accept and practice the faith that Jesus laid out in His Sermon on the Mount. Go and read it–Matthew 5, 6, and 7–and then radically trust Him and live your life according to what He said.

Only by faith can we live out the full potential which we have been given by our Creator.

from our Lay Leader

I pray the Lord’s Prayer almost every morning. I contemplate all that Jesus intended for us to realize in our relationship with God in this brief prayer. It contains much more than we can begin to understand, yet it illuminates much about the life God has given us. One morning recently, I heard these words as I prayed the prayer Jesus taught us to pray:

Ultimate Reality, which exists everywhere and is worthy of all that exists,
May we experience your domain in our earthly lives as those who have gone before us experience it now.
May we have everything we need to sustain our earthly existence
And during this time may we give fully of ourselves to you and one another.
Help us to resist the temptation to focus on ourselves and protect us from any agency that is not about your purpose.
We pray these things in fulfillment of your domain, power, and purpose.
Amen.

from our Lay Leader

Sin is its own sentence. God does not have to accuse us; our own sins accuse us. God does not have to punish us. Our own sins form our penalty. Our sins punish us with guilt. That is the form of our punishment. Unrelenting guilt that forms bars as hard and as confining as the iron bars of a real life prison. And only God can vanquish our guilt. Only God can free us. Only God can offer us forgiveness of our sins.

But only by accepting God as our Creator and Giver of Life can we come before him and ask for forgiveness. He does not offer blanket forgiveness. We must ask, we must acknowledge our sin and express our desire for forgiveness and our willingness to submit to God, and pledge to change our way, to move away–in the opposite direction–from that sin. God responds to this humility with unconditional forgiveness. Only then is our personal guilt able to be released. Some people–after receiving God’s forgiveness–still hang on to their guilt, believing that they are still judge, and sentencing themselves to a life sentence. But if we believe that God is the only sovereign of our lives, He commutes our self-imposed sentence, He pardons us, and we are set free from the prison of our guilt.

From the Lay Leader, inspired by the Pastor’s sermon on Sunday, a prayer practice to instill during the season of Lent.

Make Space

Make space
Make space for God’s grace
Make space for God’s grace in your life
Make space for God’s grace in your heart
Make space for God’s grace in your body
Make space for God’s grace in your day
Make space for God’s grace in your place
Make space for God’s grace in your relationships
Make space for God’s grace in your seeing
Make space for God’s grace in your listening
Make space for Gods grace in your thinking
Make space for God’s grace in your speaking
Make space for God’s grace in your praying
Make space for God’s grace
Make space

from our Lay Leader

Last Thursday, NASA’s Mars 2020 mission team safely landed the rover “Perseverance” on the surface of Mars and within a minute transmitted its first picture of the Martian landscape. I watched NASA‘s TV coverage transfixed as the “socially distanced” team members sat at their mission control stations anxiously awaiting the status of each milestone event until finally the big one came: “touchdown confirmed.” As the team jumped up from their seats and punched the air above their heads and shouted, I raised my hands and clapped and wept, my facial muscles contorting my face uncontrollably. I was surprised at the strong emotional response I felt.

What was the cause of my emotional response? A few days before the landing, I had watched an interview with the manager of the mission’s entry, descent, and landing team, who had served that role on four previous Mars missions. He said when the mission team celebrates at the moment of a successful landing, the emotion they feel is not happiness – it is relief. It is the release of the anxiety of whether the landing will be successful, which has been building up incrementally over time and crests in the second of time before the signal that the spacecraft has safely landed. Those team members have worked on the mission for many years, some more than 10. Their lives have revolved around the planning, designing, testing, and building of the spacecraft and preparing for the execution of the mission. Their ultimate goal is to have the purpose of the mission fulfilled – the exploration of another planet. But the success of the mission is also the affirmation and culmination of all their work over those years – thousands of hours for each person – in creating from nothing something. Something meaningful to themselves, to their souls, and to all of mankind, and nevertheless accepting that everyone on the mission team is fallible, that every one of us of the species, Homo sapiens, makes mistakes. And when everyone’s efforts are wrapped up together, they suffer collectively in their anxiety and celebrate together in success.

Since mankind began sending spacecraft to Mars in the 1960s, about 50% of the missions have been successful. Each person who was part of this Mars 2020 mission team accepted this prospect when they began working on this mission, the prospect that all of their effort – all of their hard work, many nights of sleep deprivation, angst over critical decisions, and nagging worries whether they overlooked something critical to mission success – would result in about a 50-50 chance of achieving the intended purpose. A huge investment by each person and the chance of failure equal to that of success. All of that pent-up anxiety over the years, all of it was released in that one moment: “Touchdown confirmed.”

My own emotion was driven from several acting forces: relief and compassion for the mission team members, gratitude for God‘s answer to my prayer asking that the spacecraft land safely, joy at the prospect of future exploration and discoveries on Mars in the coming weeks, months, and years, and fulfillment of my more expansive desire for mankind to explore the universe, a passion that I have had since childhood.

The universe is an amazing, awe-inspiring creation. The universe is Reality; it is the manifestation of God‘s creativity. Exploring it and learning more about it – our own planet, our neighboring planets, comets, asteroids, stars, galaxies – is immensely satisfying. In exploring and discovering and learning about the universe, we are coming to better know God, ourselves, and our place in the universe. He has given us this desire to know Him, to know Him through His creation, to know His purpose for us.

As David tells us in Psalm 139:14, we are wonderfully made and God’s works are wonderful. God has given us the ability to go beyond ourselves, to go beyond our own cradle of humanity, and to explore distant planets as well as our inner selves, and to experience the God who made us and who made the universe. And the journey is worth every bit of our investment, because God rewards us as we seek Him and He releases every bit of anxiety that we hold, assuring us of success in our continual pursuit of Him.