April 29, 2008
Dear Members and Friends of Nokomis Heights,
Grace and peace to you in the name of Christ our Lord.
In sincere fondness for the friendship and Christian fellowship we share, in gratitude for your partnership in our shared ministry, and with strong confidence in our church's leadership, I am announcing my resignation as Senior Pastor in order to accept a call to serve the broader Lutheran community. My new call will be the Regional Representative for the Middle East through the Global Mission unit of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). My final day at Nokomis Heights will be Sunday, June 8, 2008.
While I was not looking to leave my ministry at Nokomis Heights and my ministry among you has been meaningful and fruitful, this opportunity provides me with a unique chance to merge together two important parts of my personal character: my professional interests of serving God in the church and my global experiences and interests.
We have shared together a discussion about the nature and call of Christian vocation. One part of the theology of vocation is the call to serve God in the neighbor in any and walks of life. In all that we do, we can contribute to God's ongoing love for the world. Another important part of the theology of vocation is God's desire to uniquely prepare individuals, through their gifts, experiences, academic training, etc., to make a unique and faithful impact in their world. God shapes each of us for service toward the neighbor. God has been shaping me as well.
My experiences in the Middle East and the Islamic world began by living in Cairo, Egypt for five years (1978-1982) during my formative years. My father was pastor at two English-speaking congregations there. Later, I called Jerusalem my home (1989-1997). There I was exposed to the church's ministry promoting peace and justice within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In part, these experiences led me to pursuing and earning a Master of Arts degree in Islamic Studies with a focus on Christian-Muslim dialogue and relations. At Nokomis Heights, much of my energy and leadership for developing our ministries in Ethiopia and through Resources for the Enrichment of African Lives (REAL) utilized my international interests and passions.
This new position matches my professional interests and vocational calling. The position of Regional Representative for the Middle East is an extension of the Chicago-based ELCA Global Mission office and will require me to represent the church and its many local interests in Egypt, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. The ELCA works with many fine and purposeful ecumenical organizations where I will have a role. I will work closely with our strong and faithful missionary personnel of the region. I will share the stories of the good work of the church with the ELCA. I am also excited to help identify new opportunities for ministry in a region of the world desperately in need of hope and peace.
Michele and I, along with our boys, Alex, Andrew, and Liam, will deploy, likely in August, to Cairo, Egypt following extensive ELCA global mission training in July. It is important for you to know that Michele, too, has received a call to serve in an associate capacity with her responsibilities to be further defined once we are settled. I ask for your prayers for me and my whole family in this time of great transition. We will all need your love and support as we embark upon this exciting and challenging reality.
And, know that I am intensely grateful to God for your faithful presence with me in ministry during this chapter of my life and ministry. I encourage you to trust that God has many and various ways of leading the church, both around the world and in the local congregation. Just as God has uniquely prepared me for a role such as this, your continued partnership in carrying on the ministry of the church here, even amid times of transition, is part of God's work, too. And the Spirit will continue to bless and lead you.
In Christ's Service,
Pastor Peter Johnson
My siblings and I are planning the next Johnson family reunion during the summer of 2009. We plan to gather in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and expect almost 60 people to attend. It is our tradition to hold a family reunion every three years. It works well, and attendance, for the most part, is strong.
I see these reunions as a touch-base. It reaffirms the roots from which I come. Since the family is so spread out and some of us communicate only through yearly Christmas letters, I can see my extended family again, sharing more deeply our experiences of the last three years. I can witness first-hand how life has developed for each family member. Always, the years between reunions contains great successes (like high school graduations) and loses (deaths). It is a cycle of life that we share together as family. And the event succeeds in grounding my identity in the whole of the family.
I think Holy Week is like a reunion. As Christian people, we journey through the rest of the year. During this time, we live life. Children are born. Hospitalizations occur. There are family weddings. There are promotions in the job, and even job changes. There are basketball games of our kids, and then we move on to the next sport. What has occurred in your life since last year's Holy Week?
Holy Week becomes a reunion in that it we come together to touch-base again with God. All the celebrations and the challenges of life from the past year accompany us as we enter into the week. It can become like an intentional retreat into the sharing of life with God. To use another image, we carry into Holy Week baggage, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And we get to unpack our baggage, lay it out for God to see and to share in.
And what does God do for us during this special week? God renews our grounding within God's story in Christ. We are God's, with all our joys and pains. As we offer our lives, we encounter and receive again the good news of life God gives in Christ. Welcome to worship during Holy Week as we are re-grounded as God's people.
A friend of mine has a plaque in his office that reads, "Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God." Suffering from a broken heart is a hard thing. Perhaps you can remember your first 'crush', perhaps in high school, which resulted in your heart getting broken. There is no other way to say it: it hurts. There are other times when we suffer from a broken heart, like the death of a loved one or another kind of profound disappointment. We know what it feels like.
Can we imagine the heart of God breaking? On the one hand, God is so complex that understanding how God might be feeling approaches arrogance. This is because, on the one hand, we want to know that God is an all-powerful creator, with majestic works all around us, to use the words of the Psalm. We want to attribute to God a timelessness and providence, that the whole world is held in his powerful hands, down to the sparrows of the air. We trust that God is so all-knowing that he even knows the count of the hairs on our head. Can God's heart break?
As Christians, however, we can also see God in his Son, Jesus Christ. Martin Luther taught that the true face of God is shown through the life and death of Christ. Through Christ, God is revealed. And we could say that Christ encountered broken-heartedness. For instance, it was Christ himself who wept at the death of his friend Lazarus, sharing in the emotion of his death with the whole of the community. There is another passage from the Gospels which has Jesus looking out over the city of Jerusalem from the next ridge, the Mount of Olives. He shows similar emotion in his disappointment at the city's faithlessness. Can the Son of God, part of the Holy Trinity, be that sensitive?
An affirmative answer to this question is a fundamental part of our Lutheran understanding of the theology of the cross. God enters into the broken-heartedness of our lives, enduring the pains of human existence, even human death, which for him, took him to the cross. So, where there is suffering and injustice, we believe that God's heart is breaking right beside our own.
So, as we continue our Lenten Wednesday evening series of Finding Peace, we trust that God truly accompanies us on our journey. God knows that we need a peace that surpasses understanding. Even if the world can't give this kind of peace, to use some phases from and E.E. Cummings poem, God holds us in his heart. Thanks be to God. That is a good place to be.
Toot! Toot!
I know that this is an unusual way to start a blog entry. But you know from my past writings that I enjoy discovering little stories about grace. That is, stories about a flaw in a character or a story, only to have it resolved by forgiveness. I hope that this is a familiar story for you, as it relates a great deal to God's story in Christ for us.
So, what about Thomas the Tank Engine that has gotten my attention? My son 3-year-old son Liam is into trains these days, and those miniature trains and tracks, bridges and curvy track are never far away. There is the little blue Thomas (engine number 1), red James (engine number 5), or a few other trains that are part of the Johnson family set. Created by Wilbert Vere Awdry, the first little engine story, and then model train, was created back in the 1940s to comfort his son who was sick with a fever. It is also important to note that Awdry was also a Anglican priest.
In Awdry's stories, the engine's live on the Island of Sodor. Each engine has a certain responsibility and gifts which keep all the people and events of the island running smoothly: some are fast, some are slow, some are strong, and some smaller. Often, the storybooks are about how Thomas might be grumpy because he was late dropping something off, but at the end of the story, it was really just on time. Or Gordon (I forget his engine number; ask Liam) was too tired to pull the trains up the hill, but Edward (again, ask Liam) comes along to push the train from behind. Or James (engine 5) is scared about the route he must take along the sea because in it there are monsters, only to find out that they are not monsters in the sea at all, but black seals. In the end, according to the railway master Sir Topham Hat, all the engines are proclaimed "really useful engines".
What do I see in these stories? Without using religious language, he is telling the story of God in the world at its most basic level. Life is not always smooth running. But moving forward together in hope, looking after each other, God declares us his own.
I might be reading into the story a bit; but Liam is only three. I can't leave Liam's dark room at night without telling my own, made-up, Thomas story, blending into my bedtime stories some good words of grace through Harold the Helicopter. And I am thankful that these are some of the last words he hears each night.
Toot, toot!
We hear a great deal about living a balanced life. It presents to me the image of 'keeping balls in the air': self care, relationships with spouses, family and friends, and jobs, just to name a few. Frankly, I grow weary trying to lead a balanced life, mostly because I know how good and desirable it is. Realistically, I also know how hard it is to achieve it in what has been called our permanent whitewater lives. Frankly, it is easier to fail than it is to succeed.
In the December issue of The Lutheran magazine which focused on this issue, Dr. John E. Kirkpatrick states that "we seem to know what we should do [in an effort to balance our lives]. Doing it is the tough part. To live a healthy, balanced life we should fight the trends by taking charge." I am the first to admit that this is far easier said than it is done.
In his book called The Centered Life, Dr. Jack Fortin shifts appropriately the dilemma from a "balanced life" to the "faithful life." Now, that is music to my ears! When we see this dilemma through the lens of faith, we permit God to engage us. On the one hand, we can ask the question, "what would God have us do?" And on other levels, we can ask "what has God already done for us?" Now, that is a conversation containing hope.
Lent is a time for introspection and turning toward God in a new way. Our Wednesday evening theme is "Finding Peace: A Journey Toward Spiritual Health and Wellness." We will place before God and ourselves some of the places where our well-being can be challenged. And find places in God's story where we can find comfort and guidance. What kinds of challenges do we experience amid family relationships which upset our well-being? How does the struggle for justice in the world effect our inner balance? What if we are stuck in jobs that are far from fulfilling? We also hear about financial crisis around us which threatens people's well-being. What is a faithful life when it comes to personal finances? Make note of the calendar of our Wednesday evenings during Lent, and join us for soup suppers, too.
Lent Schedule (7pm worship on Wednesdays of Lent)
Finding Peace: A Journey Toward Spiritual Health and Wellness
Feb. 13 The Faithful Life
Feb. 20 Family Well-being
Feb. 27 Community Well-being
March 5 Vocation Well-being
March 12 Financial Well-being