From the Bishop's Desk

This Easter Triduum will be unlike any we have experienced. Three short weeks ago, most of us expected we would be back in our churches by now, basking in the familiar patterns of rite and ritual, grateful to have concluded these enforced days of separation. Now we wonder about Pentecost and even beyond. What began as an annoyance has become an existential threat. Holy Week has actually become the narrative trajectory of our lived experience.
   A chorus penned by John Lennon has been looping through my head the past few days. “Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days, indeed!” It actually makes me smile because, in truth, I’ve been told plenty of times; and throughout my life. In Sunday School I’d been taught the story of the people of Israel with its attendant tales of plague, woe, misery and hardship. From my mom and dad I’d heard the stories of the Great Depression and what it meant to live in times of fear, uncertainty and scarcity. I still remember the cold war era “duck and cover” drills we experienced in early grade school. I had been told the story of my maternal great grandmother who had died when the Spanish flu had ravaged the community of Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1918. I had been told there’d be days like these, lots of times! I’d simply forgotten.
   But there’s no forgetting now. Nothing feels the same. Everything seems different. The world really has changed, in ways we are only beginning to know and understand. But some things haven’t changed. And the truth of some things have, indeed, become clearer and more focussed. The love of family. The need for community. The faithfulness of a loving God. Our dependence on these things has become crystal clear, as indeed they always have for those within the human family, both past and present, who have found themselves living, like us, in uncertain and fearful times.
   Many people, me included, have also been depending on you to help us spiritually navigate these strange waters. As your bishop, I need you to know that I have been deeply moved and powerfully inspired by the faithfulness and creativity with which you have engaged that work in recent weeks. Whether low tech, hi tech or no tech! You have faithfully lived out your vocations in beautiful ways that are appropriate to your respective contexts! I am so very proud of you! 
   Dear sisters and brothers, as you lead our people through the Great Three Days, I want you to know that I have never felt more connected to you; in prayer, in faith, in practice. You are a blessing to me and you have made my heart full. Looking ahead, we know that things may well get worse before they get better. But we also know that in faith, we will – indeed and in time – get through this. Remember, strange days can also bring strange blessings. But they are blessings, nonetheless. May you experience 
such blessings in abundance as you lead our church during these holy days! Resurrection is coming!

Count on it!

In his book Free At Last?: The Gospel in the African-American Experience, Carl Ellis talks about theology through musical metaphors. He writes, “Like classical music, the classical approach to theology comprises the formal methods of arranging what we know about God and his world into a reasoned, cogent and consistent system. Classical theology and classical music reflect God’s oneness. The unity of God’s purpose and providence is reflected in the consistent explanations and consonant harmonies of classical music and classical theology. “
“But God is not just classical. God is also jazz. Not only does he have an eternal and unchanging purpose, but he is intimately involved with the difficulties of sparrows and slaves. Within the dynamic of his eternal will, he improvises. God’s providential jazz liberates slaves and weeps over cities!”
He concludes, “Theology bears analogy with music in that it too can be approached as formal or dynamic.” Classical theology is concerned with “propositions” while Jazz theology is concerned with what happens when those propositions interact with pain, life and the moment! “

I think the church’s theological vocabulary needs both classics and jazz. In life as in music – it’s only by having spent time in the woodshed learning the old standards – doing our scales – that we develop the dexterity which allow us to syncopate, improvise and respond to the call of Divine Love! Likewise, in life as in jazz, no moment is just a moment. Every moment is pregnant with the possibility of God being revealed to us. Each instant of life has the potential of God using us to make something beautiful; broken strings and all! Our theological language need to reflect both these realities. 
The same God whose Spirit song called this world into being, is still preserving and sustaining it, still improvising with us, in us and through us. And because of that we are able to do wonderful things with the instruments that have been given to us! As such, I would ask you to consider the possibility that the Holy Spirit might be composing yet more beautiful music for the Church to sing. It may well be that the very best of humanity’s collective song has yet to have been sung!
So long as our bass line continues to be a strong and abiding faith in God our creator. So long as our common melody is expressed in lives lived in praise of Jesus our Saviour. So long as the harmony of our song remains grounded in the continued presence of the Holy Spirit working in; among and through us for the world’s salvation; this can and will be most certainly true! AMEN

This past fall, our church began a four year deep dive into some of our primary Christian faith practices. Our National Bishop invited us to join her in a new four-year emphasis on Living our Faith, as together we pray, read, worship and love.
   From September 2019 until September 2020, ELCIC members have been invited to join in a year of prayer. As a whole church, we will learn about prayer, grow in our experience of prayer and deepen our regular prayer practice both as individuals and as a church. It is a call that I very much welcome!
   I have been lifting up this theme as I engage in my annual series of visits with our rostered leaders in their respective Ministry Areas. Specifically, I have asked each of the participants to bring a prayer that holds particular significance for them, to share with their colleagues. We then have a broader discussion about prayer practices and what we might do to help revitalize the prayer life of our church and its members. It’s been an instructive and encouraging exercise for me.
   I have been particularly struck by the wide breadth of prayerful resources that my colleagues access in their individual prayer practices. Some use traditional liturgical forms; others use sacred readings and prayers that have been passed on to us by our ancestors in the faith. A great many of them use poetry or music, both contemporary and classical, to increase their awareness of God’s presence and to enter more deeply into it. Some take daily time to sit and pray in their church sanctuaries. Others have their most prayerful experiences in the out of doors and seek out sacred spaces in the midst of creation. 
   I suspect that many of us, through no fault of our own, carry a pretty minimalist definition of what constitutes “a prayer.” Prayer is primarily about directing a series of petitions, concerns and requests to God in the hope or expectation of receiving some favour in return. And while that kind of prayer certainly has legitimacy – I pray those kinds of prayers all the time – I see this year’s prayer emphasis as a much needed opportunity to go much deeper and wider.
   I have come to define prayer as being any specific practice that we engage in to more fully enter into the presence of God. The purpose of any prayerful exercise is to draw closer to God; not for the purpose of obtaining some special favour or merit, but for the simple blessing of the encounter itself. It’s about increasing our awareness of God’s presence and steadfastness. It’s all about the relationship. Anything that helps you do that, be it a prayer book, a walk in the woods, a song, a paint brush, a potter’s wheel or a poem, is a legitimate means of entering into prayerful communion with our creator. 
   So let’s use this special year as an opportunity to claim and celebrate prayer in its broadest of definitions! Who knows, we may discover that we are a more prayerful people than we had ever imagined!

At our 2018 Synod Assembly delegates engaged in some challenging conversations and exercises that identified how racialized differences, and the lack thereof, impacts the life of our church and its congregations. It accentuated the need for a better understanding of who we are as a predominantly white church and how we can engage and welcome a more diverse group of people in a good way.
   In support of the ELCIC’s strategic goal to foster Reconciled Relationships, the Synod Assembly mandated the establishment of a Racial Justice Advisory Committee to lead us in this important work. The following article highlights some of the actions currently underway to do just that. In addition, we are recognizing February as Black History Month by highlighting some extraordinary men and women who have contributed much to our past and present history both in Canada and the United States.
   I encourage you to participate in the online discussion, “PROJECT STORY” and, if you are able, to consider joining our visit to the Buxton, Ontario Historic Site, one of Canada’s first Underground Railroad communities that became home and refuge for many of the first slaves to escape the U.S. southern slave owners.
   We all have much to learn. Please stay tuned for further news and resources that might assist us in becoming a community of believers that better resembles Christ’s body in all its fulsome diversity!

I love Christmas. I’m no Scrooge. But year by year I have become more distressed, if not depressed, by the consumerist bacchanalia which dominates our North American commemoration of Jesus’ birth.
   Although we might try to deny it, most of us are quite aware of where we sit in humanity’s seating plan. We are a part of the 20% of the wold’s population that consumes 80% of its resources. And yet, in spite of our riches, in spite of our technological expertise and strength, many of us feel that we are dying of thirst. We seem to have everything, and yet more and more of us feel that when it’s all said and done, we are starving for that which has ultimate value! Ours is an age characterized by profound spiritual hunger and longing. As writer Anthony Giardina once wrote, “the best educated generation in history is anxiously in search of the one sentence that will teach us how to live!”
   On a number of occasions I have had the opportunity to visit poorer nations in the Global South. To experience the life of the church and its people in contexts that are very different from here at home. And on each occasion, I have been powerfully impacted by the depth of spiritual strength and beauty that I have experienced in people whose lives are a never ending experience of horrific poverty, want and violence. 
   On one of these visits near the conclusion of the civil war in El Salvador, a group I was with had a meeting with Dean Brackley, an American Jesuit theologian at the Central American University in San Salvador, home to the community of Jesuits who were massacred by the Salvadoran military in 1989. A member of our group asked him, “Why is it,” he asked, “that we experience such a profound spiritual vitality here in the midst of such violence and poverty, while at home, in the midst of abundance we seem to be living in a kind of spiritual desert?” 
   Dean’s answer has stayed with me and given me cause for many hours of reflection since. “We in the North,” he replied, “because we have so much, have a permanent low-grade confusion about what is really important in life and because of that, it is much more difficult for us to live the life of a disciple.” 
   It has been said, and wisely so, that it is only by being little that we can ever discover anything that is big. This, I think, is one of the key points of the gospel, that blessedness, the new and abundant life that Jesus points toward, is always found in smallness and humility. And maybe the only way for us to experience the life and the hope that Jesus calls us to, is by taking the risk of making ourselves a little bit smaller and admitting that for us today, left only to our own devices, it is impossible.
   St. Augustine once wrote that, “Hope has two lovely sisters; anger and courage. Anger, so that what must not be, will not be. Courage, so that what must be, shall be.” As we mark these holy days of Advent, may God grant us the gift of renewed hope, with enough anger to change that which must be changed and enough courage to become that to which we have been called to be! Who knows? Such gifts may make for a more holy Christmas.

Here’s a distressing fact. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is the whitest denomination in the United States. The 2014 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study found that 96% of the denomination’s members were white, 2% black and 2% mixed race or Latino. 
   We don’t have similar demographic data for Canadian religious groups, but I suspect that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada would show similar numbers. This should be a matter of significant concern. Increasingly, over time, our demographic profile is becoming less and less representative of the general population as a whole.
   Here’s another fact. Jesus was a poor, often homeless, brown-skinned, one time refugee; an indigenous man who lived under colonial occupation.     Truthfully, there is not much about that profile that is typically represented in the composition of our worshipping assemblies. 
   Why is that? Is it merely the result of a few accidents of history and dominant immigration patterns? That’s certainly part of it. But that’s not all of it, not by a long shot.
   At our 2018 Synod Assembly, we stated a commitment to “the vital and urgent work of confronting the sin of racism and to the dismantling of racist and colonial attitudes present in ourselves, our church, and our society.” 
   We further committed ourselves to 
   1. in-depth self-reflection and learning with respect to the issues of racism, privilege, diversity, and right relationships, 
   2. individual and corporate confession of racism as a structural sin which exists in our churches and communities, 
   3. after the process of confession, repentance, self-learning, and reflection to humbly respond to invitations from communities that experience the debilitating effects of racism and with communities that live with privilege, to find ways to journey together, confronting the reality of racism.”
   To help us in this work we have created a Racial Justice Advisory Committee to lead our Synod in the work of racial justice awareness, learning, and advocacy. 
   One of their goals is to create safer spaces for conversations about race, in our Synod, Ministry Areas and congregations. They would like to provide a point of contact for those who could use some support, advocacy, and/or a listening circle for those who have had painful experiences related to issues of race and privilege. 
   You can find a helpful resource to use in your congregation at the following link https://www.easternsynod.org/resource/working-toward-racial-justice and contact the committee through their chair, Rev. Joanna Miller (mailto:joanna.e.miller@gmail.com)
   I wish these colleagues well in their work. Some of the conversations they hope to encourage will be difficult. The intent, however, is not to shame or belittle, but to challenge and motivate. 
   The hope is that our synod, in all its expressions, would become more inspired and better equipped to experience and express anew the liberating power of God’s grace to grow and bless human community beyond the lines of kinship, race, ethnicity and class by which we have typically defined ourselves.
   I believe that most of us long to be a part of a church whose corporate complexion more closely resembles the reign of God in all of its rich fullness and diversity. I know that I do. But I also know that we have some very challenging and difficult work to do before that vision can become a reality. I know that I need to change and that we need to change. 
   Can we do it? Absolutely! Will we do it? That, of course, remains to be seen.