Really Real

Dear WRC,

What a week. The shooting in Buffalo is still pretty raw.  The 2nd anniversary of George Floyd’s murder reopened that wound.  Then the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas where 19 elementary school children and 2 teachers were murdered and another 17 people injured.

In our consistory meeting on Tuesday night we began, as we always do, by dwelling in the Word together, looking at Matthew 28:16-20.  Lindsay gave voice to the question on all of our minds: where was God today?  As we prepared to close the meeting in prayer, Dave asked another question we were all feeling: how do we even pray right now?

Where was God on Tuesday? Or May 14? Or May 25, 2020? Or during countless other tragedies in our lives and life together? And how do we pray when the grief is still so thick? When we’re still grasping to understand what and how and why?  When patterns emerge of brokenness so deep we can’t see to its bottom or imagine a way across? 

Last week I was in Montana for my Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) program and made sure to take a number of opportunities to get out on Flathead Lake on a kayak and just float on the turquoise glacial water and soak in the expansiveness of the place and the glory of the snow-capped Mission and Swan Ranges towering over the eastern horizon.  We gathered at Flathead because this place, like no other, shaped Eugene Peterson’s life and work, faith and imagination.  It was easy to see how transcendence had been baked into his soul, how he came to understand the expansiveness of Christ’s playing in the world.

I’m now home and trying hard to hold on to that deep sense that was so apparent as we gathered to sing and pray, work and laugh in the shadow of ponderosa pines: God is what is really real.  God is what is really real. 

I don’t mean that we should just ignore the tragedies and suffering of this world.  I don’t mean that this evil, injustice, and violence isn’t real.  I don’t want to downplay the horrors of this week one iota. 

But I also don’t want to allow them to define reality.  I don’t want to be so drawn into the news cycle that I lose sight of the God who is far more grieved and far angrier than I am.  I don’t want to forget that God, in Christ, is reconciling the world to himself (1 Cor. 5:19).  That God is somehow, someway at work even here, even now, to restore and renew and redeem even this.  I don’t know how.  I can’t even imagine how.  But I don’t need to for it to be so.

God is what is really real.  To know that and to trust that is to be given the gift of knowing that as horrible as these acts of violence were, they are in reality only penultimate truths.  They are second-to-last truths, not ultimate or final.  There is a truth that goes deeper, that stretches wider.  And far from leading us into apathy toward others’ suffering, knowing this actually calls us deeper into it.  It frees us to look it square in the eyes, unflinching.  It allows us to truly weep with those who weep, to be fully present with those who suffer. 

We may not know where God is, we may not know exactly how to pray, but we know that God is here—somewhere, somehow—working. So we continue to pray, even if the best we can muster are tears and groans.  And we continue to show up expecting to see Jesus somewhere in the midst of all this pain and suffering, because the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it

Lord, have mercy,
Pastor Andy

Of Grace and Killdeer

Dear WRC,

This past week has been a study week for me.  That means I’ve spent the last few days reading and feverishly writing, trying to crank out the 30-50 pages that I have to turn in next week that will eventually become the first two chapters of my Doctor of Ministry thesis project.  I’ve been thinking deeply about complex concepts and trying to clarify my own understanding of the thousands of pages that I’ve read, but what I really want to tell you about is the killdeer that I saw yesterday.

I was right in the middle of my afternoon writing session when I realized that the book I needed was at home.  I threw on my coat and ran home, grabbed it, and started to read as I came out my side door and went to cross the street.  I looked up from the book to check traffic and that’s when it caught my eye: a bird I had never seen before there on the sidewalk next to the sanctuary.  It was about the size of a robin, maybe a little bigger, light brown coloring on its body, but with a large white band around its neck and a pointier beak.  It was the way it ran that was so intriguing.  It put its head down and tail straight out behind and didn’t hop or bounce, but ran, fluid and level.

It ran around behind the sanctuary.  I followed.  It kept going around into the cemetery.  I followed again.  Each time it would allow me to get no more that 25 feet away and then would run a little further, pretend like it didn’t see me, bob its head up and down almost like it was hiccupping, and wait to see if I followed.  I did.  It ran again.  We repeated our little dance until we were halfway across the cemetery and I conceded.  

I came into my study so I could find out what this new bird was.  Google knew in one try: killdeer.  Killdeer are shorebirds in the Plover family—those legs and beaks perfect for scouring mudflats and sandbars—but they are also known to inhabit other wide-open spaces with low vegetation like golf courses, athletic fields, and, apparently, cemeteries.  While I had never seen one, they are fairly common birds that range across North America.

Still, there’s something about that Killdeer that I just can’t shake.  Part of it is how unexpected it was.  I had no intention of birdwatching.  I was fully engrossed in something else and then: there it was.  There was also something new about it.  I had never seen, or at least identified, a killdeer, and had never seen that beautiful white ring or the way they ran.  It was the way it ran, the motion fluid, yet swift.  It didn’t just fly away.  It almost seemed to want me to follow it.  Such grace.

That’s what it was: grace.  Unexpected, interrupting, new, beautiful, swift, fluid, inviting.  It was grace that met me Wednesday afternoon as I crossed the street with my nose in a book and my mind far, far away.  Grace brought me back to myself, to creation, to wonder.  It made a grown man stalk a bird through a cemetery in broad daylight.  Grace.

“If we are not to simply contribute a religious dimension to the disintegration of our world, join company with the mobs who are desecrating the creation with their hurry and hype in frenzy and noise, we must attend to what we have been given and the One who gives it to us.  One large step in the renewal of the creation today, this field upon which the resurrection Christ plays with such exuberance, is to not take the next step: stand where you are, listen to our Lord: attend…adore.” (Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 118).

In Christ,

Pastor Andy

STOP.

Dear WRC,

I’ve never been very good at knowing what I need, and I’ve often been even worse at asking for it from those around me.  Maybe it’s because I’m a middle child who internalized a need to make and keep peace, not to disturb or inconvenience others when I could just bear it myself.  Maybe it’s because I’m a 5 on the enneagram and tend to live in my head—I’m seldom aware of my feelings—always watching the world and attempting not to be seen myself.  Whatever the cause, I’ve been feeling for a while like something was off but haven’t known what to do about it.  First, I noticed that my mental bandwidth had shrunk—I wasn’t able to keep as many balls in the air and remember and juggle things the way I was used to.  Then I noticed that my emotional bandwidth was disappearing, too—in some places I noticed my fuse was shorter, in others I noticed apathy or disconnection.  More recently I have noticed that my spiritual bandwidth has also been sapped—I struggle to sit in silence, it is hard to sit down and pray. 

The more I began to notice these things creeping in, the more I began to wonder what to do about them.  I figured they had to do with the toll of the pandemic, but I didn’t really know what to do about it all.  The Doctor of Ministry work provided some reprieve and energy, but it felt like a band-aid on a larger wound.   With the worst of the pandemic seemingly behind us, I assumed that if I just kept going my “tank” would slowly refill, but, just as it sounds, that wasn’t a very hopeful direction.

Then I got an email.  It was from an old friend of ours, Billy Norden, our former Associate Pastor who now works for the RCA’s Board of Benefit Services.  It was a mass email to churches and pastors announcing that they had just received a grant from the Lilly Foundation to offer something they were calling “Clergy Revitalization Grants”.  These grants would fund 2-3 week “Mini-Sabbaticals” for pastors in 2022 to help fight against the growing wave of clergy burnout as a result of these last two years. 

Suddenly there it was clear as day: this is what I needed and this was how to ask for it: sabbatical.  Not a vacation, not just a break: sabbatical, “A Sabbath to the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:10).  There’s not room here for a thorough explanation of the concept of Sabbath but it is essentially an invitation to stop for God.  Eugene Peterson writes, “When we work we are most god-like, which means that it is in our work that it is easiest to develop god-pretensions.  Un-sabbathed, our work becomes the entire context in which we define our lives.  We lose God-consciousness, God-awareness, sightings of resurrection… We must stop running around long enough to see what he has done and is doing.  We must shut up long enough to hear what he has said and is saying” (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, 117).  My soul screamed: “THAT is what you need!” To stop running around long enough to see what God is doing; to shut up long enough to hear him, too.  To stop.

With great hesitation I approached our Personnel Committee and then our Consistory with the idea.  It is even harder to ask for what I need than to know what it is, and you have already been so generous and supportive.  I told them I needed someone to care for my soul for a little while, space to seek God.  We talked about what that would look like, what it would mean. The conversation was filled with love, encouragement, and support.  They encouraged me to apply and several reached out afterwards to show even more love and a desire to help.  Even just by talking about it, hope began to spill in over the horizon.

There are two points to this letter—and neither is a backwards way of inviting sympathy.  First, I want you to know that I was awarded one of these grants and will be away on a mini-sabbatical from July 11-31 in order to stop and listen and seek God.  The second is actually more important: to invite you to wonder what you need and how you can ask for it.  Maybe you need something like a sabbatical, too.  Maybe you need a more firmly established weekly practice of Sabbath.  Maybe you need to talk to someone and be cared for—a therapist, a spiritual director, your pastor.  Maybe it’s something else entirely.  Maybe you don’t even know what you need.

God used an email to give me the gift of seeing what I couldn’t see, to answer prayer.  Maybe this letter can do the same for you.  Or maybe God will use something else this week.  Or next.  God is always working and always up to something, if we have the imagination to see it. Whenever and however that invitation comes, I hope you’ll take it.  I hope you take it as an invitation deeper into the heart of God, to come to the one who offers rest, real rest, to all those who are weary and carrying heavy burdens.

In Christ,

Pastor Andy

Knocking Off the Plaque

Dear WRC,

This Monday I went to the dentist.  I don’t know what your relationship with the dental profession is like.  Many don’t like going to the dentist, some are ambivalent, and only the crazy few really love it.  I tend to be somewhat ambivalent.  My dentist and his team are great (shout out to our own Brian Marino!) and I tend to have healthy teeth, but I still don’t really look forward to going.  I know they’re taking care of me in really important ways, but I don’t love having to confess that I try to floss every night but that I don’t actually do it as often as I know I should, leaning back in the chair while they pick at your teeth with those sharp tools, cramming that thing in your mouth so they can take x-rays.  If not painful, much of it is at least uncomfortable.  And I have pretty good teeth!  There’s nothing wrong with them, yet still I go every six months for them to be checked and scraped clean because even though they’re healthy and I take pretty good care of them, plaque still forms around the edges and if it isn’t taken care of it will slowly but surely become something worse.

This Monday I went to the dentist.  This Wednesday we began Lent.  It strikes me that the two may actually be quite similar.  Some people don’t like Lent, some are ambivalent, and only a few crazies love it.  But it’s an opportunity every year to stop and pay attention to something really important that most of us take for granted the rest of the year: not our teeth but our souls.  It’s an opportunity to be asked the question: “How are you taking care of your soul?”  We may shuffle our feet, avoid eye contact, and respond: “Well, I try to pray every night but I don’t actually do it as often as I know I should.” We get to remind each other that it’s okay, there is always grace, but also that it’s really important for our long-term health if we want to follow Jesus. 

Thankfully we don’t have any of those sharp dental tools to poke and scrape you or big x-ray machines to stick in your mouth, but in Lent we’re invited into some specific spiritual practices that may feel just as uncomfortable.  On Ash Wednesday we put ashes on our forehead to remind ourselves that we’re all going to die, that life is shorter and we are more fragile than we like to admit.  We’re invited to fast—maybe from food one day a week or from social media, screens, or alcohol for all 40 days.  Fasting is actually quite a bit like a soul x-ray.  Give up food for a day or one of your avoidance strategies like your phone or that glass of wine, and before long you’ll come face to face with what’s in your soul—worry, fear, anxiety, sin.  Maybe you’ll even find a cavity and need to come back for some restoration work. 

Why do we do this? Not because we’re sadists, but because even if we’re healthy and taking good care of ourselves, plaque grows up around the edges of our souls and if it isn’t taken care of it will slowly but surely become something worse.  None of this is really fun, but neither is going to the dentist (sorry, Brian!).  We do it anyway, because it’s important and going in for some help now beats a root canal later. 

When I was in seminary, I didn’t have dental insurance, and it took a few years after moving before I finally found a dentist here.  I think it was about six years since I had seen a dentist.  It got to the point where I felt so ashamed about how long it had been that I was actively staying away.  I think I was afraid they’d take one look at me and say, “It’s been HOW LONG? What’s wrong with you? Well, let’s get in there and start pulling.” When I finally did make an appointment, they were surprisingly gracious and kind.  I had a cavity that needed to be filled.  It didn’t feel good and I missed part of a day of work to have it taken care of, but I’m glad I did (don’t google: “what happens if you just leave a cavity?”). 

Maybe you feel the same way about church, or Lent, or prayer, or Jesus.  It’s been a while.  For one reason or another you fell out of the rhythm and more time has gone by than you’d care to admit.  You know it’s important but you’re scared about what they’re going to find or how Jesus will respond when you finally show up again.  Well trust me, Jesus is more gracious than any dental hygienist.  He has no interest in shaming you, only healing and helping.  No matter how long it’s been or how you feel about it, Lent is a great time to step back in for some soul care.  Take it as an invitation to think about how you want to care for your soul, to step into some spiritual practices to knock some of the plaque off and take a look inside your heart.  Lent isn’t necessarily fun, but it’s incredibly important for life following Jesus.  In the weeks to come I hope you’ll take the invitation for a checkup.  Join us for worship, spend 30 minutes in solitude and silence journaling about how you want to take care of your soul, consider fasting in some way, join one of our discipleship opportunities, or just stop by some time and talk with me.  I promise it will be better than a root canal.

In Christ,

Pastor Andy   

D.Min. Update

Dear Wyckoff Reformed Church, 

I returned recently from my second week in residence at Western Theological Seminary for my Doctor of Ministry program, “Holy Presence: Eugene Peterson and the Pastoral Imagination.”  Upon returning I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to do this, to be with these other pastors, to be in on these conversations, to devote time and energy to this task.  I was also struck with the sense that I have not done a great job of including you in what I’ve been doing and studying.  To be honest, I have wanted to include you but haven’t really known how.  This letter—and those that will hopefully follow—is an attempt to remedy that.

First, the details.  I was in Holland, MI from Sunday night, Jan. 9 to Friday night, Jan. 14.  Like last time, I stayed with my parents in Jenison, about 25 minutes east, and borrowed one of their cars for the week.  Our meetings began at 1pm on Monday, designed to give our group of 20 pastors time to travel and then get some rest and decompress before diving in.  Our cohort is comprised of pastors from all over the country and from a wide variety of denominations and traditions, but the sense of community and friendship has run deep and fast.  Our churches are all very different but we are here because we share a common vision of what we want to be about as pastors, how we want to live this pastoral life, and that has proved a strong bond.

We had the opportunity throughout the week to pray together, discuss various pieces of the five books we’d read over the last few months, share the 20-page papers we had written as we begin to discern what our individual projects will be, and hear from our guest lecturer, Rev. Dr. Tyshawn Gardner, pastor of Plum Grove Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, AL and Vice-President of Student Affairs at Stillman College.  Dr. Gardner led us in a discussion of “Sacred Anthropology and Social Crisis Preaching”, essentially: how do you preach and pastor in a world that is not okay?  Some of the most meaningful times, though, were the informal discussions we had over lunch, gathered around hors d’oeuvres at our director Winn Collier’s house, or over a drink at Butch’s Dry Dock after our sessions had finished.  A personal highlight was getting to have dinner with Jacob Carlson and Liam Naumann, freshmen next door at Hope College, on Wednesday night at New Holland Brewpub (they’re doing great, by the way)!

Where our first gathering felt like going to summer camp—Will they like me? Will I fit in? Do I belong? How is this going to go?—this time felt more like going back for your sophomore year of college—you’re settled with your friends, know where everything is, and have an idea of what you’re studying and why you’re there.  As I think about the overarching takeaway from the week I’ve come back to a growing sense of gratitude for this work and this life and for you.  One of the things Eugene Peterson sought to do was recover the dignity of pastoring and to call pastors back to the holiness of their work.  I’ve felt that call deepen and a growing sense of awe in your presence because of God’s presence with us.  I hope you stop to pause some time to realize that these people around you any given week in worship are no ordinary people, but sons and daughters of the King.  You are in the presence of royalty, in the presence of the Holy Spirit, alive and aflame in each of us.  It’s a beautiful and remarkable thing.

Now that I’m back, these next few months will be made up of more reading (I already finished another book!), continued research for my dissertation project, a formal submission of a project proposal, and showing up to Flathead Lake, MT—where Eugene grew up and later retired—in late May with the first 1-2 chapters of my project drafted.  I would appreciate your prayers during this time, not just for the work that needs to be done but for the formation God is working in my soul as I do it.  Pray for discernment as I narrow the options for my project and begin to write.  And if you want to know what I’m reading, let me know!  I’ve wondered about how to read one of these books with you at some point but I’ve had to go through them so quickly that I haven’t been able to stop and figure out how!

Thanks again for supporting me through this adventure.  I can tell you without a doubt that this is exactly where God wants me and what God wants me doing.  Now let’s see what God is going to do with it!

In Christ,

Pastor Andy

Thank You!

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ! 

As followers of Jesus our lives are lived in the landscape of gratitude. Thanksgiving is our fundamental posture in all things. How? Why? Because the defining reality of our lives is the grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. That grace is the first word, and every word of ours is a response that begins: “Thank you!”

There are times when that gratitude comes more naturally than others.  Times when it is easier or harder.  This is one of those easy times.  As we prepare this year’s contribution statements, we are so aware of how richly blessed we are, that behind each one of these statements there are not just financial gifts but prayers and time and talent used for Christ’s ministry in our community.  These gifts themselves are acts of thanksgiving, and as they cascade out, like the gracious waters of baptism itself, they resound, filling our life together: “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

Another thing of which I am conscious this year is that The Wyckoff Reformed Church is not an abstract, impersonal organization that you have chosen to support like you would a community organization or public radio station.  This church is our life together.  It is this network of relationships and experiences.  It is the worship we offer every week.  It is the presence of God and the action of the Holy Spirit in one another on Sunday as well as Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.  It is our shared grief and longing, as well as joy and celebration.  This is a holy thing, hiding just beneath the surface of the seemingly mundane.  Wyckoff Reformed Church is us, called out and gathered together in the name of Jesus to be His living presence in the world. 

Thank you, Jesus, for such a gift! Thank you for being part of such a holy thing!  Thank you for supporting it!  Thank you for being us! Thank you!

In Christ,

Pastor Andy