“It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it means that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is his splendor.”

This quote by Nicholas Wolterstorff has come back to me as news reports have come out of Israel, each overwhelming and unimaginable in their horror. Images of mourning parents and dust-covered crying children. A fragile peace decimated in a matter of days in one of the most significant holy places on earth. So many innocent lives changed forever on account of the violent actions of a few. How can this happen? Where is God in this?

“How long O Lord?” This is not a new question. It appears often in scripture, most often on the lips of the psalmists and prophets. It is a question born out of an expectation that the Creator of all things is both compassionate and powerful to act in response.

A fully satisfying answer to this question may need to wait until we meet our Creator face to face. Yet we cling to the conviction that God does indeed care, and that God grieves and that God acts.

We come to understand the compassion, love and yes, sorrow of God, through the life, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, who wept at the death of his friend Lazarus and again over the city of Jerusalem and the destruction it would soon face. God, through Jesus, entered our suffering, and stands with us in solidarity with our grief.

Yet, to stop there, is to fall short of the calling Jesus set forth for us: to bring about a foretaste of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven. This Jesus, who followed love all the way to a cross, forbidding Peter to take up a sword in his defense, is the Jesus we follow today. Let us cry out for peace, with our words as well as our actions, trusting that the God who mourns with us and over us, also works through us to bring peace and wholeness to all corners of the earth.

Nothing feels better than being certain about something. In our day-to-day lives we are always looking for “clear cut” and “sure things.” It makes sense then that we would seek the same things in our spiritual lives. To our chagrin, certainty is elusive in the realm of the spiritual. Sometimes our pursuit of certainty gets us into trouble. We use it as a measure of achievement, either feeling guilty about not reaching a certain level of it, or feeling judgmental over those with reservations or doubts.

There were certainly people in Jesus’ day who were certain about their faith, but those weren’t the ones Jesus called to walk alongside him. The disciples were all over the place, sometimes boldly confessing Jesus as Lord, and other times denying him. Peter didn’t believe he could walk on water with Jesus right in front of him. Thomas needed to put his hands where the nails were just to believe Jesus had resurrected. Not prime examples of certainty!

What did seem to be a quality shared by the disciples was their desire in seeking the face of God. Certainty can be a ruthless way to measure faith, one that keeps track of our failures. However, to measure our faith by our desire to seek the face of God does not keep track of our failures,

but how we respond to them. The church is for seekers, open to all who seek the face of God, in spite of the doubts, uncertainties and failures that are a part of life. Let us persist in this journey of life with all of it’s ups and downs, acknowledging our imperfection, yet persistent in seeking the author and perfecter of our faith.

It seems to be a fairly universal human trait to want to know exactly what goes in each box. We have a work box, we have a family box, we have a faith box and so on. This pandemic year has turned our boxes upside down into one pile in the middle of the floor and the experience has been overwhelming to say the least.

The box we guard most closely and tend to be most protective of however, is our faith box. We like things a certain way and we like them predictable. There has been nothing predictable about church this last year, which has ranged from distanced indoors with masks, to drive-in, to pre-recorded, to Zoom from the couch, to no church service at all.

It has been a year of frustration, but also a year of stretching, and as it turns out, sometimes in stretching we find new growth. We have become more creative in finding meaningful ways to sing, worship and fellowship from digital spaces. We have involved the gifts of more people instead of leaning only on one pastor. We have supplemented our Sundays with intentional spiritual practices during the week, leaning on friendships and taking advantage of the quiet spaces that isolation has given us. We have lived into the phrase “the building is closed but the church is open.”

Pastor Meghan Good, in an article called Taking Jesus Out of Your Box, brings to our attention our tendency to “become wedded to the vessel instead of the thing it was made to contain.” She writes: “We see God somewhere, build a box around it, and celebrate the divine capture, never noticing that God is standing behind us, tapping on our shoulder.”

All of us are looking forward to the day when we can return to our sacred spaces, embrace each other without fear and sing praises to God without masks. And hopefully when we do, we remember the ways we have been stretched. May we be willing to shed some of the of the old that has perhaps been holding us back, and embrace some of the new that surprised us with meaning during our pandemic worship. May our boxes of faith serve to hold, but not to contain the wild and living God that is always revealing to us something new.

I had the opportunity to take our youth group to our biennial church conference in Kansas City several weeks ago. Dustin Gaylon, one of our speakers speaking during a morning worship session, made the comment that “the fear of fear is community.”

In the Gospel of John, as the end of his time on this earth nears, Jesus promises his disciples that he will not leave them comfortless. Before he is taken up into the sky the disciples receive the power of the Holy Spirit. But we should also not forget that as Jesus hung on the cross in John 19:25-27 he also instructs his followers to care for each other.

While the disciples were initially paralyzed with fear cowering and barricaded in a room following the crucifixion, they were soon empowered, not just by the Holy Spirit, but through the community they shared with each other as they spread the Gospel and planted new communities of faith.

The things we fear most, when brought before God and shared with our community of faith, become much more bearable. Community is a gift of comfort from God. Let us embrace it with open arms.
– Caley Ortman, Chaplain

As Christians we believe the Bible is the living word of God. What does that mean exactly? It means that alongside studying the context of what the text meant to its original audience, we are also called to ask what the text is speaking into our lives today. There are many ways to do this, but the way that I have found particularly powerful the last few years is the question, “Where do you find yourself in the story?”

Asking this puts us into a story in a new way, not as the reader, watching passively from a distance, but as a participant. We should be encouraged to ask wondering questions: What was it like to be this person? How would I react if that was me?

But we also should be attuned to knowing when we are to identify with someone other than the main character in the story. Take, for example, the parable of the Prodigal Son: You can read the story and find yourself as the prodigal son. Six months later you might very well find yourself as the jealous brother, or perhaps the forgiving father.

We never stop reading the Bible because it can speak to us differently through different characters as our life circumstances change, meeting us where we are on our faith journey. Embrace the living word and never stop asking, “Where do I find myself in the story today?”
– Caley Ortman, Chaplain