WORSHIP

Pastor's Message

​When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

-Woodie Guthrie

            This past week I spent a few days at the Spent Dandelion Retreat Center in Two Harbors, Minnesota. While there I spent a day exploring a couple of state parks along the Northshore. As many of you know, that rugged coastline has an ethereal, transcendental power. It is for me a window back in time, standing on billion-year-old rock, looking over cliffs, tens of thousands of years old, carved and pressed and lifted by glaciers long since retreated. I think of the Ojibwe people and their long history with the land, searching for manoomin, and finding it here in the Northlands. That is “food on the water” or what we know as wild rice. There were of course the fur trappers and voyageurs an early connection between the old world and the new giving rise to many of the French place names and surnames we see today. I am struck by the gigantic ore docks and freighters, some active some long abandoned, carrying countless tons of taconite ore to steel mills far away.

            In such places you feel so small. What am I in the grand sweep of countless millennia and the ceaseless march of time and history? Yet if we are attentive, if we feel, sense, listen; if we take the time to be quiet there is also connection. If we are present, we perceive we are a part of this thing that is so much larger than ourselves.

            These past few days I thought of these words written by Woodie Guthrie. They are words I sang out of our grade school song book back in the day. I thought they were nice at the time but now I feel they take on a heightened relevance, an urgency. When so much is unraveling and falling apart, when grace, understanding and nuance is such a scarce commodity, these words perhaps feel hopelessly naïve.

            Yet I can’t help but feel that if we are to understand one another, to let go of the fear and anxiety that stokes our anger and rage we must be attentive to Guthrie’s words. I think this does two things. First, it cannot fail to humble us. They  remind us of how small we are and how foolish our pretensions, judgements, strident attitudes can be. Second, it grounds us. It reminds us that each of us are created in the image of God, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The land upon which we stand, upon which we live and work and cultivate and build and develop and dream was made for us, for you, AND for your neighbor. God lovingly and carefully crafted a bounteous and beautiful creation of which we get to be a part. We have but a small verse in the grand sweep of cosmic history, but we get a verse. There is something about standing on rock that is incomprehensibly old that has been created and carved over hundreds of millions of years looking out over an inland sea tens of thousands of years in the making, there is something that can’t help but make me feel, make me yearn, for wholeness, for peace in my heart, for peace in our communities, for peace in our country. This is not just some hippy dippy milk toast peace but one that lives into the promise that this land, this creation, in all that it has been and will be, is made for you, just as it was made for me.

As Ever in Christ,

Pastor CJ