Light

Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord;
and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night;
for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.
(Book of Common Prayer)

The first time I heard this prayer was from a woman who was a member of the congregation I served in Pasadena.  Mary Rogers was the matriarch of one of the families in the church.  Mary and her husband John along with their two sons and their son’s wives had all immigrated to the US from Northern Ireland.  At the time I heard her recite this prayer from memory she was simply sharing with me how the prayers from the prayerbook of the Church of Ireland had shaped her faith.  She said this particular prayer (actually the slightly different Irish Protestant version of it) had been especially important to her.

Hearing her recite this prayer from the liturgy of the Evening Prayer Service and seeing the look on her face as she recited it made an impression on me.   The words stuck with me, and the utility and versatility of this prayer became immediately obvious to me:  As this day ends and as the darkness falls, Lord, we are aware of how much we need your light.  For your light is a merciful kindness to us.  One that helps us to navigate the path of faith and avoid the pitfalls and traps that might cause us to stumble.  Give us the gift of the light of your Son Jesus, who is the Light of the World.

This everyday prayer is also a good prayer to pray at the beginning of Advent:  Lord, as the light goes away, as we move closer and closer to the longest night and the shortest day of winter solstice, we pray for your light.  Let the decreasing light call us to look for your inextinguishable light.  Let it break into our various sources of darkness, our depression, our despair and bring with it the healing warmth and illuminating brightness that we see in the loving countenance of your Son, Jesus who is the Light of the World.

The Advent Wreath is a visual version of this prayer.  As the light decreases in the move toward winter solstice we light a candle each week to remind us that God’s light cannot be extinguished.  We participate in a discipline of hope.  Those five dimly burning wicks all point to the glory of Emmanuel, God with us.  With us irrespective of our circumstances.  With us irrespective of our level of awareness.  With us even in our fatigue when we have no energy to look for the signs of his presence. Just as the Psalmist in Psalm 139 prays: “If we say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover us, and the light around us become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” 

O come, thou Dayspring,
come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here;
and drive away the shades of night, and pierce the clouds and bring us light!

 David Rohrer
11/26/2022  

Faith

“Look, we have left everything and followed you.
What then will we have?”
Matthew 19:27

It’s of course Peter who asked what everyone else was thinking, but no one else ventured to ask. He asked it in response to Jesus’ reflection on the encounter with the rich young man who wanted to know how to acquire eternal life.  Peter wanted a more straight forward, and perhaps easier, answer to question of what one must do to get into the kingdom of God.  Perhaps, the sub-text behind Peter’s question went something like this: “If this rich guy’s riches are not a sign of God’s blessing and if he has to get rid of all of that stuff in order to get in, and given that we have left everything, do we qualify?  Are our deeds enough?”

Jesus’ answer to Peter’s question is telling.  On the surface it is: “Yes, it’s enough Peter.” (Everyone who as left houses or brothers or sister or father or mother or children or fields for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life. (Mt. 19:29)) But like most of what Jesus says it is delivered with nuance and framed in a way that says: “It’s not that simple, Peter.  This isn’t merely about your action or a particular formula one must follow to inherit the blessing.  It’s not reduceable to a matter of making a vow of poverty.  It’s a matter of noticing and acting on what it is that facilitates and what it is that inhibits one’s ability to follow me.”

Here is a story that illustrates our overwhelming urge as human beings to reduce an invitation to ongoing relationship with God to the miniscule world of religion where we set up a system of rules and regulations that define who is and who is not allowed into the kingdom of God.  And not only do we come up with this list of religious “answers” or “essential tenets,” we make that list synonymous with the word “faith”.  These dos and don’ts become the things that define the faith, or my faith.  Faith becomes a commodity I can have more or less of depending on the degree to which I can stick to the rules or adopt the tenets.  Faith becomes a personal set of practices that prove my devotion. Or faith sadly becomes something that the one outside the fold looks at and says: “I could never have that much faith.”

Yet this idea of faith has little, if any, resonance with what the Scriptures call faith.  In the Bible faith is used not so much in the sense of a noun but an adjective.  Faith in the Bible is about being a faithful person.  Faithful to a relationship.  Influenced by, acting out of, working within the bounds of a covenant relationship with God.  Surely, that faithfulness manifests itself in certain behaviors.  But the behaviors grow out of the relationship.  They are a response of gratitude for the relationship.  They are what we do because we want to honor and protect the relationship.  They are practices that seek the Other’s best because that One is seeking our best. 

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb 11:1)”  Now there’s a circumlocution for you!  Faith, in other words, is something that inspires faithfulness.  We trust in a relationship with the One whom we have not really seen.  Faith is living in the assurance of God’s love and grace and acting out of that conviction.  Faith is living into and out of our trust.  Faith is being faithful. 

Jesus’ first invitation to his disciples pretty much says it all:  Come and see, follow me, abide with me, stay with me.  This invitation to simply be with him, abide in the place that he has made for us and allow him to abide in the place we have made for him is a sign of God’s merciful and persistent pursuit of relationship with us.  It is a mercy that is, as Jeremiah says, “new every morning.” Every day is an opportunity to live into the source of our hope and act out of the conviction that the One we have not seen loves us with a love from which nothing can separate us.  This is the substance of our faith.  This is what it looks like to be faithful.   

David Rohrer
10/21/202

Distractions

“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.”
Luke 10:41-42

One of the unforeseen benefits of giving time and energy to the work of being a volunteer puppy raiser for Guide Dogs for the Blind is that the experience has been a rich source of material for this space.  It is a veritable garden of metaphors for describing the process of our spiritual formation.  This, along with the way that Latifah and Wailea (our two most recent female black Labrador retrievers) have grabbed ahold of our hearts and gained access to our souls, makes for fertile soil in which this spiritual growth can take place. 

One of the cardinal rules of puppy raising is paying attention to what are referred to as the three D’s: Distraction, Duration and Distance.  A big part of the work of training is about directing and redirecting the puppy’s focus:  Rewarding sustained focus on the “right” things and inviting them to redirect their focus when they are paying too much attention to the “wrong” things.  The interaction of these three D’s is what we are asked to consider when we are trying to refocus the puppy’s attention.

When the puppy wants to pull toward another dog or a squirrel who darts out from a bush, we introduce a distraction from the distraction to get her focus back on us.  When we see a dog up ahead of us, we consider the matter of distance and assess how close we can come to that dog and keep our puppy on task.  When our puppy is staying on task, we stay attentive to the matter of how long the puppy can reasonably be expected to maintain that good behavior and not go after the thing that might be enticing her to do otherwise.  In short, in the interaction of these three factors we try to manage the environment in such a way that the puppy can be successful and then be rewarded for that success.

But here's the thing: we can’t remove the distraction.  We can’t somehow remove the possibility of distractibility; we can only gradually teach the puppy to stay on task despite it.  It’s all about learning to cope.  It’s not about removing the distraction or somehow eradicating it from the field of view.  Rather it is about engaging it, dispatching it, relegating it to someplace of lesser importance and moving on with the more important task of being a guide dog, because a guide dog who takes off after a squirrel, ceases to be a guide dog. 

I am pretty distracted these days.  And frankly, most of those distractions easily become invitations to anxiety and maybe even despair.   It’s all too easy to take my eyes off the One who holds all things together (Colossians 1:17) when I am also dodging the shrapnel of various cultural and political explosions.  So, I am asking what I can do to manage those distractions and refocus my attention away from the destructive and toward the edifying.  How do I put more space between myself and the invitations to despair?  How do I increase tolerance of and decrease reactivity to the cacophony of the doomsayer’s warnings?

As I was preparing the worship service for last week the story Martha and Mary in Luke 10 came to mind as one tool that might be helpful in this attempt to refocus.  Jesus’ word to Martha that night was a calming reminder that there are more important things to ponder than the world’s various invitations to anxiety and despair.  As Martha busied herself with trying to get everyone fed and make everyone happy; as she fielded an unending stream of distractions that were coming her way; as she noticed everything and felt like she was the only one noticing the most important things; Jesus gently and lovingly took her aside and said: “Stop!”

Take a break Martha. Come sit next to your sister, Mary.  Put some distance between you and your current version of the most important thing.  Have a look instead at the gifts of love and grace that your sister is receiving. Martha, Martha, the food you have prepared is great, the setting for this party is lovely, the gathered guests are happy. Good work, but now enjoy what you didn’t plan, and what you cannot manipulate or control.  Take a look at Mary. She’s apprehended the truth that your distractions are preventing you from seeing.

Basically, it’s a call to worship.  And worship is a very effective distraction from the unhelpful distractions that have accumulated during our week.  Worship puts some needed distance between us and the media shouts that tell us to jump into the nearest foxhole and take cover.  Worship is a call to refocus on the One who has a firm hold on us and has promised not to leave or forsake us.

Worship doesn’t minimalize or deny the distractions. They are dangerous and they are real.  But they aren’t the whole story.  And they aren’t therefore worth our exclusive attention.  In worship we let ourselves be reminded of where our primary focus needs to be.  Worship directs our attention to what Jesus calls “the better part.”  It’s where we are fed with the food that sustains us for life’s journey because it’s where we remind ourselves that we were made by God for a place in God’s heart and that we will be restless until we find our rest in God.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up; my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother;
    my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.
Psalm 131

David Rohrer
07/08/2022

Jeremiads

“For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and a derision all day long.”
Jeremiah 20:8

 It was probably in a college English class where I first heard the term.  A jeremiad is a “complaining tirade in a tone of grief or distress.”  It’s a word that alludes to the oracles of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah.  Often referred to as the “weeping prophet” Jeremiah preached sermons that pointed to trouble on the horizon and invited people to adjust course to avoid disaster.  When people saw Jeremiah set up on a street corner to deliver one of his messages, many crossed the street and passed by as quickly as they could on the other side.  He was the preacher they loved to hate.  After all, who wants to make a steady diet out of “complaining tirades in a tone of grief or distress.”

Jeremiads are not pleasant to listen to.  While they tell truth, they do it in a way designed to increase our discomfort.  They seek to highlight just how desperate the situation is and raise enough of a clamor to awaken us from a slumbering indifference so that we will rise up, change course and thereby head off certain doom.  But the seeming hyperbole with which they are delivered often does little more than inspire an eye-rolling response.  At worst, they make us want to shoot the messenger.

Such was the case with Jeremiah.  He was given the nick name “Terror is on Every Side.”  The phrase was Jeremiah’s chosen description of the status of Israel and became a phrase of derision that people spit back on him.  “O there he goes again: terror is on every side.  Please, can’t someone shut that alarmist up?” Jeremiah had the rather unenviable task of calling people back to God at a time when God seemed to have abandoned his people.  The Chaldean armies had destroyed the walls and the temple of Jerusalem and taken most of the surviving leadership of the failed kingdom into exile in Babylon.  Jeremiah had warned them of this impending doom and even after it happened people wanted little to do with him.  But he continued to stand in that gap between God and God’s people and give witness to the truth of God’s desire for covenant relationship.    

Jeremiah’s one big message was simply this: “Things are bad.  You’ve been living a lie.  It’s time to turn around and take in the Truth.  Turn toward God.  He hasn’t abandoned you.  In spite of your exile, God is still with you.  God will not let go of you.” It’s not easy to listen to and believe in a message of hope when all evidence seems suggests that despair is the better response.  Enduring an exile is never easy work.  When we feel like we are no longer at home and won’t be getting home any time soon, when we are surrounded by people who are not “our people”, when all of our familiar moorings have been severed, it’s hard to take solace in God’s assurance “I am with you to deliver you.”

It’s hard to relax into the promise of God’s steadfast love when we feel abandoned.  It’s hard to rest confidently in God’s presence when all evidence suggests God is absent.  But dealing with these kinds of feelings is not new to any of us.  Exile is not an unfamiliar experience in the life of faith.  And Jeremiah is not the only prophet in the Scriptures whose ministry is dedicated to helping us address this experience.  In fact, it could be said that the task of turning our eyes toward God in times when he is hard to locate is pretty much the central task of our time together every week in worship.  We gather to remember, to refocus, to encourage one another to turn away from all the invitations despair and scan the horizon for signs of God’s hope.          

Almost six hundred years after Jeremiah, Peter answered the same prophetic call.  Speaking to first century Christians who lived under the oppressive dominance of Rome, Peter delivered a similar invitation: “If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.” (1 Pt. 1:17) “Finally, all of you have a unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart and a humble mind.  Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but on the contrary, repay with a blessing.  It is for this that you were called—that you might inherit a blessing.” (1 Pt. 3:8). 

There is great strength to be found in the silent and often invisible dedication to the simple tasks of loving God and loving neighbor.  They are things that can be done irrespective of circumstances.  Whether we are enduring chaos or enjoying stability, whether we are resting at home or struggling with an unwanted exile, we can scan the horizon for signs of God’s work and entrust our neighbors to that work.  The storms in our immediate vicinity are real, and they may be with us for some time, but there is One who transcends our circumstances.  Jeremiah says it well:

The thought of my affliction and homelessness is wormwood and gall!
My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind, and therefore have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
God’s mercies never come to an end;
They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in God.”
(Lamentations 3:19-24) 

David Rohrer
08/15/2022

A Companion on the Way

“[The Lord] put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.”
Psalm 40:3

A few years ago, I participated in a nine-month Ignatian retreat called The Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Life.  We met on a Saturday once a month at St. Joseph’s Catholic church, a Jesuit parish on Capitol Hill in Seattle.  At the first session, while we were milling around before the program started, I was approached by one of the spiritual directors who was part of the leadership for the retreat. He extended his hand and said, “Hi, my name is John, are you David?”  I replied, “Yes, but how did you know?”  And he responded, “You’re carrying a Bible.  I’m the person assigned to be your spiritual director.  I read your application in advance of today’s retreat and figured the guy with the Bible must be the Presbyterian minister I read about.”

We both chuckled at the obvious cliché or gross generalization represented in the remark. Protestants bring their Bibles to Church and Catholics don’t. And a Presbyterian minister’s Bible has somehow become permanently affixed to its owner. 

At the risk of sounding painfully pious, the generalization is pretty much true for me.  Even when I go on vacation, my Bible is always one of the literary companions that I pack for the trip.  The big reason for this can be found in the middle of the book.  A collection of 150 prayers, organized under the heading “The Psalms”, is a part of the way I start most days. 

If my Bible had an electronic tabulation of most frequently visited sites, the Psalms would be the winner. The older I get the truer this has become.  As much as I love reading other parts of the Scriptures, I keep getting drawn back to the Psalms.  This is mainly because they don’t just tell me something about God, they give me words to pray back to God.  They tell me the truth that it is ok to be honest with God. They remind me that my affections don’t need to be run through a censor’s filter before I let them hit the ears of God.  The Psalms are, as Calvin put it, “an anatomy of all parts of the soul.” 

So when I am between sermon series on Paul’s letters, or Jesus’ parables, or the prophet’s oracles, I usually return to the Psalms.  When I don’t have the energy to “study” the scriptures, I just join my voice with the voices of the saints that have gone before me and sing the songs they have taught me.  I let them speak for me.  And I never cease to be amazed by how much permission they give me to just be who I am and feel what I feel in the presence of God. I never cease to be emboldened by the risks the psalmists take with God.  I never cease to be impressed by the trust these poets put in God.  So, I get in their wake and let them pull me along into that stream of faithfulness.

I don’t study the Psalms so much as just I spend time with them and look for places of resonance within them. I land on words that speak to my situation and articulate my affections and ask my questions.  The Psalms help me navigate a relationship with God rather than just tell me things about God.  They don’t help me to assemble a theology of things that I should believe about God, as much as they point me in the direction of what it looks like and feels like to have a conversation with God. The Psalms are a kind of social lubricant that help me to engage and connect with God.

 So, if I have prescription that I write for parishioners who come to me for spiritual guidance it usually has roots in the Psalms.  Read the Psalms.  Pray them back to God.  Let them be your answer to God’s invitation to relationship.  Let them be both the very old and always new song that God puts in our mouths.  

David Rohrer
06/23/2022

Genuine Love

A lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
Matthew 22:35-40

Most of us who have hung around church for even a short period of time can quote the lines above.  If we know anything about the way of Jesus, we know it is primarily a way of love.  It is about loving God and loving our neighbors.  And if we are looking for a metric that is a gauge of whether walking with Jesus along this way is making a difference in our lives, we can look at the extent to which we are growing in love. 

St Paul, the Fighting Pharisee who became the slave of the Crucified Carpenter understood this fact.  His turn away from being a fiery protector of purity and toward being a grateful recipient of love opened him up to transformation.  He became consumed by a love he did nothing to deserve and was so enabled to reach out in love to worlds that he once beheld only with disgust and disdain.  What’s more he wrote copiously and beautifully about the transforming power of this Divine love.  He is today the go to for texts to be read at weddings.  Even people who know little or nothing of Jesus are familiar with St Paul’s depictions of the true character of love.  In places like 1 Corinthians 13 and Romans 12 he unpacks what love looks like.  He understands that true love is not a merely a feeling, but also a concrete action, a sacrificial extension of oneself toward another.

Over the next six weeks I want to spend some time in my sermons exploring Paul’s discourse on love in Romans 12.  Here he invites his readers to “let love be genuine (Rom 12:9).”  By this he primarily means let love be integrated; let gratitude for God’s love toward you inspire acts of love toward others and let the dutiful extension of yourself in the work of seeking what is best for another teach you about the same kind of love that God has shown you.  Love God and love neighbor and make no distinction between these two loves.  Let love be genuine.  Let love be integrated.  Let love be your resource and your goal.  Let love both constrain you and liberate you.

This all, of course, begs the question: How?  Paul understands from personal experience that he cannot write a prescription for how we get there.  He above all people knew that it took God’s transforming work to turn him around.  But what he does do is give us a picture of what this genuine, integrated love looks like.  He helps us to be on the lookout for the virtues that are signs of this love.  He invites us to identify and relax into things like humility, curiosity, empathy, and intimacy.  He reminds us that this work of becoming available to the work of God’s love is about both enthusiastically entrusting ourselves to the mercy of God and defiantly resisting the things that would have us turn our backs on God’s extension of himself toward us in love.

St John says it well: “Little children let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. (1 Jn 3:18)” Let love be genuine.  Let love be integrated.  O Lord, give us an undivided heart.   

David Rohrer
04/30/2022

Unadorned

“He has been raised; he is not here.
Look, there is the place they laid him.”
Mark 16:6

“He is not here.”  What a strange way to begin the Easter story!  Especially when the absence of the one at the center of the story had promised his followers that he would be with them always.  The close, dim, quiet, cool, and empty space where his body once was, is not the image we normally associate with Easter.  Both the secular Easter celebration that is painted in yellow, green, and purple pastels and adorned with images of bunnies and chicks, and the religious celebration that is accented with lilies, bright white paraments and accompanied by trumpets seem to have little relationship with this proclamation of his absence. The emptiness of the tomb doesn’t inspire a song so much as it just raises a question: Well then, where is he? 

In fairness to Gospel writer Mark, I hasten to point out that he does not begin with this negative statement.  He begins with the announcement, “He has been raised.” But it too occasions questions.  Raised to where?  Raised for what?  Will we see, touch, taste, hear and smell his presence again?  What does this crazy story we’ve all just been through mean? How do we go forward from here?  We can’t ignore the life changing impact he has had on us, but with his death and his physical absence we’re now just left wondering about what’s next.  

Something earth shattering and life changing has happened. But what do we do with that, because he’s not here?  He has risen.  So now what? This discomfort and the unknowns of all of this are perhaps the reason why we have come to prefer pomp and pageantry and trumpets on this day.  Maybe it’s also the reason that we came to pair the day with Northern European pagan fertility celebrations of spring and new life. They are, after all, a lot more fun. The greeting “Happy Easter” is a lot lighter than the invitation to contemplate the puzzling disappearance of a body.    

But I must confess, the Easter hype has never attracted me much.  Having to be a part of the production crew that puts on the show is something I find fatiguing.  I’m kind of an austere Puritan at heart. Or maybe a Benedictine monk.  A quiet, unadorned room with a wooden cross or a simple bench on a hillside overlooking the waters of Puget Sound are my favorite sanctuaries.  At a dinner with friends last week I heard stories of a rented Donkey making an appearance at one Palm Sunday service and of children dressed in their Cherub Choir robes having sword fights with their palm fronds, and I quietly thanked God for the absence of these things in my life. I don’t much like being the one who has to “cue the balloons” and frankly I’m kind of grateful for COVID’s interruption in our Easter expectations of a big event. During our pandemic isolation the unadorned Easter was the rule and the pressure to “up our game” was removed.   

So, I take some solace in the truth that the first “Easter” was nothing of the sort.  It was instead an encouragement to not be too quick to sound the trumpets or participate in all the flamboyance. For everything and nothing had changed.  There was a call to live into a brand-new reality in what appeared to be the same old place.   There was a strange invitation to be quiet and settle into that unadorned and frankly creepy, empty tomb for a while and contemplate this re-ordering of things.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with big celebrations.  We need them.  We should have them.  But the real point of the resurrection is not that everything will now be OK and that it’s all trumpets from here on out.  To proclaim the resurrection is also a kind of quiet realization:  O my, he’s gone; he’s alive; what does that mean for my life?  If he is alive and holds all things together (Col 1:15-20), how will I look to him to hold me together?  How will I reflect my belief in this truth to the world around me in all that I am and all that I do? How will I live in hope that he is doing the same for others and go looking for and choose to participate in this this work? 

He is risen.  It’s true every day.  So please join us at Emmanuel today for a somewhat unadorned service of worship as we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

David Rohrer
04/17/2022

The Only Way Out Is Through

“O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me;
let them bring me to your holy hill, and to your dwelling.
Psalm 43:3

“The only way out is through.”  As I recall, the first time I saw this familiar truism I was in a stationery store.  I was scanning the greeting cards.  The card on which it appeared may have been in the sympathy section, perhaps it was nestled among the get-well cards, or maybe it was among the cards under some heading like “encouragement to a friend”.  Wherever it was, it drew my eye and when I picked it up to view the sentiment inside, I discovered it was blank. 

How appropriate.  No more needed to be said.  That’s it.  I can’t offer you anymore than this.  What you’re dealing with is hard.  We both know this.  You’re just going to have to slog through this mess.  I respect you too much to attempt to sugarcoat it. Life sucks right now.  But I am confident that you’ll emerge on the other side of this swamp knowing something that you don’t know now; you’ll understand something that you will carry with you the rest of your life; you’ll have a resource that you can share with others.

It's a cliché, I suppose.  But like all clichés, it is a cliché for a reason.  It’s true.  Much of life is trouble that we simply need to get through.  We pray for deliverance in these times.  Like the psalmists, we ask for the “wings of a dove” that we might fly away and be at rest.  We cry out for a hand that will lift us out of the waters that have “come up to our neck.” But the wings don’t grow, and we find ourselves with no choice but to swim.

Yet I don’t think God’s word to us in these times is, “O come on, buck up.  Deal with this.  You can manage.”  Rather, I think it is the assurance: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”  And slogging through the swamps of life with this assurance that God “searches out our path” and is “acquainted with all our ways” provides us with a great deal of help that ultimately gets us through.  Knowing that “even the darkness is not dark to God” and that we cannot “flee from God’s presence” is what fosters the hope we need to press on despite the trouble.

“Help!” is an appropriate prayer.  “Deliver me out of this mess!” is fair game.  But there is another prayer that is, quite frankly, a bit more satisfying to pray.  “Send out your light.”  Let me know that you are with me.  Let me feel your presence.  Let me navigate this darkness with the flashlight that only you can provide.  Shine your light on this precarious path so that I can plant each step in a secure place.  If the only way out is through, then “lighten my darkness and save me from the perils of this night.”

Jesus himself is our trailblazer in this matter of getting through.  To follow him is to learn how to navigate a perilous journey that includes a cross.  This “pioneer and perfector of our faith” shows us the way through adversity.  He reminds us that adversity is not the last word.  The last word is love, and it is in that indefatigable love of God that we find the light and the strength to persevere.

David Rohrer
03/28/2022

Questions

“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Mark 4:41

Reading this question that Jesus’ disciples ask one another after he calms a storm that overtakes them while they are crossing the Sea of Galilee often takes me back to the sanctuary of Ventura Community Presbyterian Church sometime in 1978.  I was listening to Darrell Johnson preach a sermon on this text.  That weekend I took a break from my studies at UCLA, drove up the coast to spend some time with my mom and stepdad and we went to church on Sunday.  I can still hear Darrell’s voice asking the question as he repeated this part of the text several times in his sermon. 

The calm waters answered one of the disciples’ questions: “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?”  But it also raised this second question: “Who are you?”  And it’s this second question that fuels the discipleship journey.  As we follow Jesus, we never really stop working with it.  It just keeps coming up.  Who are you, Lord?  Who are you and what difference does that make in my life?  Who are you and who am I?  Why do I get to experience this?  What does this experience of following you tell me about my life in this world? 

Bumper stickers, bookmarks and billboards love to proclaim: “The Answer is Jesus.”  But I think the real power in Jesus’ ministry, both then and now, is that his presence, his actions, and his words occasion lots of questions.  I believe he is, indeed, the answer.  Yet the reason I know him to be this is because he has invited me to work with so many good questions.  It’s those questions that keep us going.  The hunger to know more about this one who has captivated us, intrigued us, angered us, and above all else stuck with us despite all the reasons we’ve given him to roll his eyes and walk away, is the reason we keep following.

There is comfort that comes in the wake of the disciples’ first question.  The roiling sea that they feared would take their lives was calmed.  They relaxed. “Oh, wow, he does care whether or not we perish.”  Yet soon after another question occurs to them that stirs up all sorts of feelings within them. The same one who makes it safe to be in the boat, now himself feels a little unsafe. And part of what lies underneath that second question is some thought about whether they want to continue to hang out with him once they get to the other side. He is, after all, now a bit scary.

Part of the reason I so vividly remember that sermon I heard in 1978 is that it got me thinking about a Jesus who was more complex, more interesting, one who made me curious, one who I wanted to follow. It got me thinking about the Jesus who feels a bit dangerous because he is alarmingly direct in his encounters with us.  He gets us to ask questions we might not otherwise ask and as such invites us to deal with truth about him and about ourselves that we might not otherwise engage. 

The answer is indeed relationship with this one in whom all things cohere, but we won’t know that if we don’t take the risk of stumbling along behind him and working with all of those disturbing questions he invites us to ask.  I think what happened for me that day I heard Darrell’s sermon, was that Jesus started to be more than a divine being who long ago solved the problem of sin by dying on a Roman cross.  He became a living Lord who was inviting me to consider and live an abundant life right now.  Who are you, Lord, and who am I? 

David Rohrer
3/2/22

2021

In many ways 2021 was the year of unmet expectations.  That great hope of a post-Covid “opening up” and return to normalcy, never fully materialized and as we stand on the threshold of 2022 many of us are not expectant so much as we are just tired.  

Nevertheless, 2021 was a year where we soldiered on and, in spite of those unmet expectations made some pretty radical changes and tackled some major projects. Never in my pre-pandemic, wildest imagination could I have predicted that Emmanuel would be a place where people had the option of worshipping either in-person in our sanctuary or on-line via Zoom.  Apart from the necessity thrust upon us by the pandemic we never would have spent close to $25,000 to create our own little TV station. We landscaped and lighted our parking lot median in 2021.  We also significantly reduced the balance on our mortgage which now stands at about $116,000.  In a year when we haven’t spent much time in our building we have done a great deal to secure and upgrade these capital assets.  

The lesson I keep learning during the pandemic is that flexibility and attentiveness are important resources.  As many of the familiar grooves of our religious practice get erased, we need to keep asking why those grooves were in place and how we will carve out new ones that will accomplish the same ends.  If we cannot meet together in person to “encourage one another and stir up one another to love and good works” (ala Hebrews 10), what new tools can we develop to avail ourselves of this essential resource?  We have addressed this question with respect to providing for Sunday worship but many other aspects of our life together have atrophied in this time.  And like parents worry about the effect of the pandemic on their children’s social development, as pastor I worry about how our isolation from each other is breaking down the relational cohesion that sustains us as a congregation.    

So as we look ahead to this coming year, I ask you to join me in prayer about paving some new pathways that will enable our mission to the community and our fellowship with one another.  Curiosity and creativity will be our friends in this endeavor.  Jesus does not intend for any of us to walk the way of faith alone.  Whereas the pandemic keeps calling us to keep our distance from each other, the way of faith invites us to seek out one another and encourage each other.  I do not have a lot of ideas about how to address this dilemma, but I know we need to at least be acknowledging it and seeking to remedy it.  I look forward to what we will discover and how we will adapt to develop some new ways of coming together for mission and fellowship in the coming year. 

Dave Rohrer—January 30, 2022
(Note: this piece was initially published in Emmanuel’s Annual Report for 2021)