Hamline Church

TogetherInSpirit

Thoughts on Lent while sheltering in place….

Good Monday morning to you all! For today’s “Together in Spirit from Hamline Church”, we bring you this Lenten reflection from our own Craig Bowron.

Download a PDF of Craig’s reflection or continue reading below…

Thoughts on Lent while sheltering in place…
by Craig Bowron

I am 55 years old. I grew up in the 1970’s in a comfortably evangelical church that believed that Christ came to save us from our sins; that the Bible was where God wrote out his thoughts, once and for all, and if you were confused about what He was trying to say, you hadn’t studied it enough; that Easter hinged heavily on the suffering of Jesus, and the power of life over death.

Our church sat on the edge of a farm field, that sat on the edge of a town, that sat on the edge of an encroaching Chicago. If one sat on the choir side of the sanctuary, and I did, you could look out an open window and stare off into the farm fields and oak savannahs of northern Illinois. Maybe that’s where I first ran into the mind of Wendell Berry, though I wouldn’t run into him for another decade or so.

While I was off to college and medical school, the suburbs of Chicago laid siege to my hometown, and eventually it surrendered to the tyranny of subdivisions and strip-malls. I worked at a Bible camp during summer break, where my Christian faith matured, even as some branches withered and brought me to these realizations:

It seemed like Christ came to save us from ourselves rather than just our sins.

It seemed like the Bible was really an impressionist painting that had been misfiled as a photograph.

Easter must be much more than a story of how Jesus won the torture contest, because many humans have endured far worse. It was Jesus’ miraculous life and not his suffering death that proved his divinity.

It seemed like God was so big that He (or even She) could not be contained inside the church. Thankfully, my life has led me to some truly Godly people, most of them living in exile outside of the Church. Some I met in person, some I met through their music, or in the case of Wendell Berry, through their written work.

I consider Wendell Berry to be one of the wisest people on the planet. I also consider him to be a Godly man, even though, as he openly admits in the prologue of his book of Sabbath poems, he is a fair-weather church goer—and the weather has to be pretty bad to put him in the pew. He’d prefer to be walking the wooded ravines of his Kentucky farm.

I will admit to being somewhat poetically impaired. Some poems, even some of Wendell’s poems, seem like a ransom note clipped and pasted together by a frantically illiterate kidnapper. I can’t see what they mean to say.

But the entirety of Wendell’s work is Biblical in depth and wisdom, and in the way it describes the human condition with clarity and compassion. It is also, to my view, a deeply prophetic voice to a frenetic, inherently violent, consumptive, free-but-entirely-enslaved modern world.

To me, the Bible is still being written, by Wendell and a host of others, and we must seek them out. They must be studied with religious fervor, the kind that produces disciples, not martyrs.

Here are a few excerpts from Wendell’s books:

“The ruling ideas of our present national or international economy are competition, consumption, globalism, corporate profitability, mechanical efficiency, technological change, upward mobility—and in all of them there is the implication of acceptable violence against the land and the people. We, on the contrary, must think again of reverence, humility, affection, familiarity, neighborliness, cooperation, thrift, appropriateness, local loyalty. These terms return to us the best of our heritage. They bring us home.”
P. 64 Our Only World

“When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life He means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves “Christians,” but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.”
P. 136, The Burden of the Gospels in the book The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays.

And a final quote, a Lenten prayer as we shelter-in-place:

“The present is going by and we are not in it. Maybe when the present is past, we will enjoy sitting in dark rooms and looking at pictures of it, even as the present keeps arriving in our absence.”

“Only the present good is good. It is the presence of good—good work, good thoughts, good acts, good places—by which we know that the present does not have to be the nightmare of the future. ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’ because, if not at hand, it is nowhere.”
P. 176 Our Only World

Together in Spirit for March 19, 2020

Thank you for joining us for Together in Spirit from Hamline Church! Our intention is to offer a daily dose of hope and encouragement to our community and beyond as a reminder of God’s love and grace at work in the world. These emails will include short videos, reflections, songs, prayers, children’s stories, and more, all created by our staff and members. We hope it brings some joy in these uncertain times. Let us know how we’re doing and what you’d like to see by replying to this email. Thank you for being here!

Today we are sharing a Sabbath reflection from the Rev. Susan Mullin. Susan shared this reflection at our first online worship on March 15, 2020.

Winter Scene

Sabbath Meditation
from the Rev. Susan Mullin; March 15, 2020
Download a PDF of this text

“What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
The narrow gate on the far side of that field…

To come in among these trees you must leave behind
The six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
Expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
Into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf.”

Let me tell you about my time in the woods. A simple time. An unspectacular time. I got to the woods by driving up to Northern Pines Camp. I arrived after a week of stomach flu followed by a week of catching up on work. I brought work with me. I was tired that weekend, and not feeling great. But I had asked Mike to put my snowshoes in the car… and felt like I should make use of them. So Sunday afternoon I strapped on my snowshoes and headed out the back door.

At first, I stuck to my usual paths. I checked on Betty’s tree–the white pine we planted in honor of Mike’s mom, and then followed the road down the hill and along the lakeshore. I greeted Wesley, one of the dogs in camp, but didn’t wait to speak to his family. Then I headed up into the woods following a well-established hiking and skiing trail. At this point, the trees began to work their magic. I was caught up in the ordinary extraordinary beauty of the woods in winter. I took in the view from the ridge above the lake, and took off my gloves to touch fraying rolls of birch bark. I sniffed the air, reveling in the crispness.

it came to me out of the blue–there was no reason for me to stay on the path! For i could see a long way through the winter woods to my eventual destination back in camp. And my snowshoes were well-designed to handle the terrain. I took off as the crow flies, and then purposely meandered through the woods, following here a deer track, there a fallen log. Experiencing time and eternity in the same day.

Beautiful.

But what is the place of sabbath when the covid-19 pandemic has upended our lives? When we are uncertain about the best way to care for our loved ones- and the stakes are high. When we are anxious about changes at work and school. When we are forced to re-adjust our plans every few hours, constantly re-evaluating and second-guessing ourselves and our leaders. When we find ourselves checking social media constantly to see how others are handling these challenges. Is Sabbath relevant?

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that Sabbath is at the heart of the gospel. The God who says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” is also the God who says, “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy” and then says “you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor…[and] you shall not covet…anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Sabbath is an act of resistance to the God of Pharaoh who would have us making bricks for his pyramids. Sabbath is an act of resistance against a market economy that sees us as valuable only for what we produce, an economy that puts us in competition with our neighbor. Brueggemann says that this odd command to remember the sabbath day is what allows us to shift from “anxious productivity” to “committed neighborliness.” God brought the people out of slavery in Egypt and commanded them to remember the sabbath- not as an arbitrary command, but for the purpose of forming a new community – a community focused on love of God and neighbor.

My walk in the woods probably did not change me in any way that was immediately apparent to the people around me. But I do believe it loosened the grip of my compulsive need to get through my checklist. It created just a tad more space and time for the practice of being neighborly.

Sabbath does this. It reorients us to what is most meaningful, most satisfying.The living water.The bread of life. It brings us back to neighborliness: kindness and compassion for our human and non-human neighbors. And this is good news, today and always.

Welcome to Together in Spirit for March 18, 2020


Thank you for joining us for our first edition of Together in Spirit from Hamline Church! Our intention is to offer a daily dose of hope and encouragement to our community and beyond as a reminder of God’s love and grace at work in the world. These emails will include short videos, reflections, songs, prayers, children’s stories, and more, all created by our staff and members. We hope it brings some joy in these uncertain times. Let us know how we’re doing and what you’d like to see by contacting us. Thank you for being here!

Today we are sharing this lovely video of Amy Ireland, Director of Children’s & Family Ministry, reading the book This is the Church.