April 4, 2026

​

Dear Friends,

We are now in the middle of the great Three Days—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter.  You might be saying to yourself, “Pastor John, that’s four days—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday,” and I suppose you could be right, but like qualitative research, counting the great Three Days depends on how you measure things: in the Bible, days begin when the sun goes down. So, we count the evening of Maundy Thursday, the Evening of Good Friday, and the evening of the Easter Vigil. Sunday morning is just a continuation of the day.

The Easter Vigil has one of my favorite bits of liturgy—well, it has a lot of my favorite bits, but one of them is the Exsultet, or Easter Proclamation. “Rejoice now, all heavenly choirs of angels,” it begins, “and celebrate the divine mysteries with exultation…Exult also, O Earth, enlightened with such radiance, and, made brilliant by the splendor of the eternal King, know that the ancient darkness has been banished from the world.  Be glad, also, O mother Church, clothed with the brightness of such a light, and let this house resound with the triumphant voices of the peoples."               

The funny thing about this is that we are all standing around in the dark, listening to a single a cappella voice as this is sung. Darkness, no trumpets, little flames from candles. It seems a far cry from the great light show and rock concert the Exsultet summons.

But that’s Easter in a nutshell. It is the faith to say that God has banished the ancient darkness, and stand up with your little precious flame, to share it with someone else until the entire room shines in glory. The flame is the good news that death has died, and as the Exsultet says, “We sing the glories of this pillar of fire, the brightness of which is not diminished, even when its like is divided and borrowed.” The love of God does not diminish in sharing, but rather multiplies over and over again.

I read today that the United State Forest Service, one of our great societal achievements is being essentially dismantled. Thirty-year experiments, observations of nature, the management of forests and wilderness, are all being stripped away so that privateers can profit from public lands. This is clearly hated by most Americans, so it is happening very quietly. It’s just one instance of the laughing, malicious darkness spreading over the world. It is easy to curl up and shut our eyes to the world, to cut ourselves off. But Easter gives us the world, because it gives us the candle of faith and the flame of love to hold in the darkness. A single candles throws the shadows into retreat—and sharing the flame helps us overcome the darkness.

This Easter I invite you to take hold of that candle to use that flame to make brilliant the darkness of your days. As we will say at the baptism during the long Easter Sunday, “Let your light shine before others, so they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”

See you soon,

Pastor John

​

*********************

March 27, 2025

​

Dear Friends,

This Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week—the high point of the Christian yearly cycle. We will welcome Jesus with palms and shouts of hosanna on Sunday, but then will hear how that acclamation turns to rejection and betrayal. On Thursday we’ll hear how Jesus left his disciples with a new commandment: that they should love one another as he loves them. On Good Friday we hear John’s version of the Passion story, culminating in silence: silence before Pilate, silence on the cross, silence in the tomb. But the silence does not last—Saturday night we take stock, hearing the stories of the Hebrew Bible, the greatest hits as they lead and direct us to Jesus, the fulfillment of the Scriptures. And on Sunday, that bright morning, we will celebrate the reality of Jesus’ risen life.

Holy Week means a lot of feelings. I always invite you, if you have never taken advantage of the whole cycle, to come to all the Holy Week services. Come and be a part of the story.

Easter Sunday we’ll celebrate the four new members at OSA: Julia Sirmons, Joe Ricci, Ryan Swihart, and Isaac Williams. Julia, Joe, and Ryan will affirm their faith with us; Isaac will be baptized. It’s going to be an awesome morning, and we are going to celebrate as we usually do, with a potluck and pancake celebration after church that day. Bring a brunchy dish to share.


See you soon,

Pastor John

 

 

***********************

March 20, 2026

​

Dear Friends,

The funny stories from John stop this week. We got to laugh at the puns, the banter, the “technique of misunderstanding,” as the commentators put it. This week John tells a story that isn’t funny at all. It’s the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

This is a hard story to hear—simply because John is careful to show us the grief of Lazarus’s family and his friends, not least of all Jesus. This story includes the shortest verse in the New Testament, “Jesus wept.” The verse enumerations were added much later to the scriptures by editors hundreds of years after they were written, and the power of that short declarative sentence, “Jesus wept,” is evident even in the choice to make those two words the entire verse.

Like the rest of the Gospel of John set pieces, the Lazarus story is beautifully crafted. Doom colors the entire story—from the beginning Jesus knows Lazarus will die, and even stays away so that he will not be asked to interfere in the death. Only after Lazarus dies does he go to Bethany. There Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary, welcome  him, confront him, and weep. It is their sorrow that moves Jesus to weep.

There’s a similarity, however, in this story and last week’s. Last week Jesus tells his disciples that neither the blind man nor his parents sinned so that the man was born blind, rather, “he was born blind so that God’s works may be revealed in him.” And similarly he says to the disciples about Lazarus, “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may glorified through it.”  Of course the sickness does lead to death, but Jesus is talking about a final death, which I take to mean complete distance from God. But as Jesus proceeds to demonstrate by raising Lazarus again, death is not too far a distance for the Word of God to travel.

This is an emotionally confusing story. As Martha tells Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” John sees the complexity of this story, and the justice of Martha’s gentle accusation: why weren’t you here? You could have been here. And Jesus weeps for it. Still, he calls out to the dead man, and the dead man walks out, and Jesus says, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Marilynne Robinson says the Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of a good God governing a world of pain. This story is one chapter in that meditation. I sometimes wonder about the suffering of this world and this idea that God’s glory will be revealed in it—but yet, in a story such as this, that cares so deeply for the hurt and pain of the world, that demonstrates God’s own pain at the pain of his beloved, and yet also ends with the image of even the strong bonds of death unwound from our human frame, I cannot help but believe that there is something, some love, that comes forth from it all. The Word of God travels past doubt, past death, and into life.

See you soon!

Pastor John

​

****************

March 13

​

Hey Friends! We need some volunteers over the next two Sundays to help sort the kitchen supplies and then store them in the sanctuary. We are going to have a heavy-duty extermination of pests next week. Any help over the next two Sundays would be greatly appreciated!
 

Dear Friends,

We are on the Fourth Sunday of Lent! That means Lent is almost over. Easter is coming in just three weeks--I hope you are getting ready to celebrate. It's coming with the flowers, with the sun, with the warmth--Jesus is coming soon.

I think of this Easter promise in the middle of Lent, and it reminds me of a poem called "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, that psychedelic, emotionally tortured, Jesuit poet:

 

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins really loved the natural world. In that way he resembles J.R.R. Tolkien--he saw the human wreckage in the beauty of the world and mourned the trampling of it. This poem's title, "God's Grandeur", would make you think that it's going to be about the sky, the clouds, the mountains, or the awesome majesty of God. But it's not. Rather it's about how God's grandeur is not found above the world, but within it, everliving, and especially in the redemption of the world. God's grandeur, in other words, is in God's ongoing presence with us, making art out of wreckage, beauty out of ruin, and thereby continually overcoming death and all of his friends: "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things...Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." The Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, lives, persists, and finally, overcomes.

I think of this because of all this mess we have found ourselves enduring. Why is there a war in Iran (and it is a war)? Why are we "being realistic" (according to our governor) and scaling back our efforts to reduce climate change? Why is our federal government attempting to restrict the voting franchise with an unprecedented attack on voting rights? (They call it the SAVE Act, which is a disgusting name, since it suppresses rather than liberates--c.f. the paragraph above). Why are we going to work instead of building barricades and tearing it all down to rebuild it better?

This poem is a reminder that the Holy Spirit dwells here. Our readings from John over these weeks of Lent also remind us about the presence of the Holy Spirit, which calls, gathers, and makes holy sinners from all over the world, and charging them with the work of God, which is the care and redemption of all that God has made.

So part of what we can do in times like these is simply insist on the deepest freshness deep down things, the beauty of the Holy Spirit with her bright wings, and tell the story of that beauty. We have hope because we have something sure to hope for. We know that that God's love for this world will overcome the human contempt for it. And we know it principally because of Easter, the day of Christ's arising, and his commission to his followers--spread the good news. Let people know that death, darkness, and corruption are not the final word. Life, light, and healing are coming. 

Believe it.

See you soon,

Pastor John

​

*********************

March 6, 2026

 

Dear Friends,


We have begun a four-week journey of long readings in the Gospel of John. These are fun stories, and stories they truly are: John is writing to open minds, to open hearts, and not necessarily to relate things exactly as they happened. If you want that, you can go to Matthew, Mark, or Luke. John works on set pieces and we get some of his great ones this Lent: Nicodemus, the Samaritan Women and the Well, and the Man Born Blind Gets His Sight and a Lot of Trouble with It.

We had Nicodemus last week, and this week we enter into a part of the country, with a new character—the Woman at the Well. I’ll talk more about this set up on Sunday, but it begins like a Biblical Romance: a woman comes to draw water at a well and meets a man. It’s a whole genre on its own—in the Old Testament, this story would end with a wedding.

But this is John, and instead of a wedding, we get a conversation. There’s so many things to say about this congregation, but I want to highlight one of them. The Samaritan and Jesus have a back and forth, almost in a flirtatious way, about where true worship happens: “You people say Jerusalem is where true worship happens, but we say it’s this mountain.” Jesus responds: "Believe me, woman, the time is coming when you and your people will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem...the time is coming—and is here! —when true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. The Father looks for those who worship him this way. God is spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in spirit and truth.” 

There’s a nugget here I’d like to bring out and polish. Notice that Jesus refuses to locate the worship of God to sacred place, but instead in the movement of the spirit, and in truth, which for John is a living thing. Modern language might say that Jesus is rejecting a static understanding for a dynamic one, or perhaps even rejecting an ethnic view of religion for a universal one. This is true: but I’d like to stay down here with the idea of place, spirit, and truth.

When we pray, we pray in many places. We might pray outside our boss’s office when she calls us in unexpectedly. We might pray at the airport before getting on a plane. We might pray in the bathroom before a pregnancy test. Prayer happens in prisons, parks, palaces, and parades. None of them would be considered sacred space. But we often confuse a place’s sacredness with the experience of God’s grace, which consecrates and sanctifies everywhere it comes. 

God created the whole world, and the whole word is sacred, made holy, consecrated by God’s love. There’s a line in T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding, that goes “You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.” Where has prayer not been valid—where has God not heard prayer? Worshipping God in spirit and truth cuts the bonds to place and space and binds us not only to God but to everyone who prays in spirit and truth. Samaritan and Judean, Jew and Gentile—you can go on and on. Spirit and truth means everyone on this holy planet can worship God together.

I say that because there are many people claiming to be Christian who just can’t stop yelling about others—mostly foreigners and LGBTQIA+ people. Worship God and love your neighbor. Hate has no home in spirit and truth. Instead, all really are welcome to the movement of the Spirit.

See you soon,


Pastor John
 

********************

February 27, 2026

​

Dear Friends,


We are about to embark on a long journey through the Gospel of John. I just want to take a minute to tell you that everything you know about the Gospel of John is wrong.

Well not everything. But the Gospel of John is comedy. You will hear jokes throughout the Gospel over the next few Sundays. You might even catch yourself chuckling—in church! Quelle horreur!

I have a sneaking suspicion, based on nothing but my own reading and sense of humor, that the Gospel of John was meant to be funny, at least in parts. And this Sunday we get a pun, or double entendre, to set up a scene at night, during a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus. Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” Well, that’s what he says in English. Or perhaps put better: “No one can see the kingdom of God with our being begotten from above.” But that’s not what John wrote. John wrote: ἀμὴν ἀμὴν λέγω σοι, ἐὰν μή τις γεννηθῇ ἄνωθεν, οὐ δύναται ἰδεῖν τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ.

Did you see that word ‘ἄνωθεν’? That word has a couple of meanings: first is "from above"; the second is “again”. Nicodemus becomes perplexed. Jesus means ‘from above’—Nicodemus understands ‘again’. This is a classic comedy bit, where two people understands the same word two different ways. Entire episodes have been crafted from such a misunderstanding. And I think that the original hearers of John’s Gospel—because most of them would have been hearers rather than readers—probably laughed. Good old Nicodemus, more like Nicodumba— never mind. 

It’s ok to laugh. John is actually full of funny bits. Laughter is a gift—humor is one of the great ways we understand the world. Laughter can both make peace and do great harm. But it is really a gift—laughter changes a room, it shuffles the emotional deck, it clears the mind. And it’s part of John’s gospel.

Later church fathers would also use humor—because what happens to hell is kind of funny. They would say, the Devil came up to try to trap souls, to lead Jesus astray. And then he thought he won! Jesus died. So he came back down to hell—and all he found was a big empty room. Because Jesus cleared it out and took them all to heaven. They thought the idea of the smug devil gloating over the death of Jesus only to find that Jesus swiped all his souls and took them away, was very funny.

I find it comforting to think there is humor in the universe—the ways dogs bark, the birds that get expressive, the way that people across the world laugh, the way slapstick translates across cultures. John’s humor is in many ways lost to us—any time you have to explain a joke it loses its power, and many of these jokes in the Gospel, well, need to be translated. But come to church and laugh—it’s good for you.


See you soon,


Pastor John

​​​​​​