Patience seems to be a four-letter word today. We don’t like to wait and when we have to, we often don’t do so patiently. These days I find myself using my cell phone to help me deal with short-term waiting like at a doctor’s office or in line at the store (not in the car!). But long-term waiting – days, month, even years – that’s tougher! Fortunately my busy life as bishop keeps me from noticing my impatience because there is always something else to do. But unfortunately, this busy-ness doesn’t give me the opportunity to practice waiting.
Of course, waiting is more difficult when we’re anxious or afraid. And we are afraid…of others, of the future, of our inner feelings and thoughts. This fear causes us to want to escape, to flee from our waiting. And when we can’t flee, we fight. Or freeze into numbness. Yes, our fear makes waiting even harder. Yet this seems to be a theme of Advent: to wait in the midst of fear. Wait in the midst of anxiety. Wait for Jesus to come again. Oh, and by the way, Jesus’ coming will change everything…yes, everything! What’s more frightening than that! In the midst of all this waiting and fear, followers of Christ are called to have faith. And we’re called to live in hope. But what does it mean to wait in faith-filled hope, even as we fear? Well, for one thing, waiting in faith-filled hope means waiting with a sense of promise. It means using all our senses – physical, emotional, and spiritual senses -- to enter into the promise that God gives us in Jesus Christ. That promise is like a seed planted in each one of us in our baptism, a seed that is nurtured in us by the Spirit, the Holy Gardener. We just have to put ourselves in places where we can best be watered, pruned, and breathed on by God’s love, all while avoiding the weeds and removing the stones that would prevent that promise from taking root and growing in us. In the end, waiting in faith-filled hope isn’t about looking at a promise from the outside. It means living inside God’s promise of new life and letting that promise live inside us. Second, waiting in faith-filled hope is active. Waiting is not a passive, hopeless, empty state of numbness that is caused by events out of our control. Followers of Christ never “just wait.” We wait actively in a sure hope that the promised seed has been planted and that God’s promise is happening to us and around us even if we can’t see it. We wait knowing that we get to participate in God’s promise for the world in glad rejoicing by standing up, raising our heads, reaching out our arms, and serving in love. Waiting in faithful hope, then, means being the conduit through which the Spirit plants and nurtures the seeds of Christ’s promise in everyone around us. Also, faith-filled waiting in hope means being patient. Patience is courage. It’s daring to stay where we are and live out our situation to its fullest in the trust that something hidden will become manifest to us. Patience means doing our best to live God’s activity in the present, nurturing every moment as the earth nurtures a growing seed, as a mother nurtures a child growing inside her. Fourth, actively waiting in faith-filled hope is open-ended. It’s being open to God’s work that is being done in our lives. “Let go and let God,” the saying goes. This is a radical attitude toward life in our “I’m in charge” world, trusting in hope that God is doing something that is far beyond our imagination or control. Waiting in faithful hope is trusting completely that God is growing us into who God calls us to be according to God’s love rather than our fear. Finally, how do we actively wait in this faith-filled hope of Christ’s promise? Well, we do it together, in love. We wait not alone but as a community of faith, the body of Christ in this place and time. As followers of Christ, we enable and empower each other to wait, creating space for others to wait, affirming for each other that there is indeed something awesome that we all are waiting for. This community is the Church, the body of Christ through which we have faith in God’s promise together, supporting, nurturing, celebrating and affirming what God is doing for our community in Jesus again and again. Ultimately, waiting in faith-filled hope is not about fear; it’s about following Jesus together as we trust that Christ’s promise is indeed becoming real for you, in you and through you in Jesus’ name. Blessed waiting to you all! Bishop Laurie
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“It’s just hopeless!” It’s easy to think this these days. Our political system is a mess. Economic inequality is everywhere. The mental and physical health of the people we love is suffering. Small farms and ranches are going under through no fault of their own. Violence continues in our schools and society. There seems to be nothing in this world we can put our hope in for a better life.
Hope is one of those words we often use to describe things that hope doesn’t really mean, at least not from a Christian perspective. Hope is not pie-in-the-sky thinking. Nor is it wishing for something we want. Nor is it about someone or something fulfilling our expectations or satisfying our sense of entitlement. No, hope that rests in our faith in Christ is something much different. When we wish or expect or imagine our ideal worlds, these come from our wishes, our desires, our expectations, what we want to happen. In other words, wishing and expecting are all about us. But hope that rests in faith in Christ is all about God. Hope focuses on God’s promises, not on our own wants or demands. Hope never expects “my will be done,” only that “thy will be done.” Hope is open-ended, not certain about the who’s, when’s, where’s, or how’s of the fulfillment of God’s promise, only certain about the what and the why of God’s promised salvation in Christ. Hope waits with patience rather than rushing around in a frustrated worry that we’re not getting what we want quickly enough. Hope trusts that what God has promised in the past WILL indeed happen in the future and may even be happening now. Hope is living in the faith that God’s promise will be fulfilled and that it will happen because God loves us so much. Really, hope is a way of life, not a feeling. In hope, we live in a joy that recognizes and empathizes with the sufferings of tragedies and unmet expectations, but still knows in a sure and certain faith that such suffering will not win out. In hope, we live out our faith-filled enthusiasm as a people whom God loves and who are called to love and serve all of our neighbors…in our activities, our commitments, and our priorities. Hope rings out in our loving and generous attitudes and in the compassion and kindness with which we treat one another. Hope is not passive; hope acts! But it always acts forward, toward the vision and mission that God calls us to live into the world through the power of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, hope is a gift, a blessing of new life given to us by the Holy Spirit, Christ’s pure grace that is so interwoven with faith and love that they can’t be separated. As Paul famously wrote, “And now faith, hope and love abide together…” (1 Cor 13:13) So, my friends in Christ, “it is NOT just hopeless” and there IS something and someone to hope in: Jesus Christ and the gift of his new life promised to you. Though we might suffer under the seemingly hopeless weight of a sin-filled world, we who live in faith know and live even now a different story, the story of a hope that does not disappoint. During this Advent season, then, I invite you to open yourself to the Spirit’s hope through the love of God poured into your hearts, to boast in your hope of sharing the glory of God, and to follow the apostle Paul as he proclaims: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom 5:1-5) Blessed Advent to you all! Bishop Laurie And be thankful…whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him. Colossians 3:15,17
“And be thankful!” How easy it is to forget to be thankful even during the Thanksgiving season. We get worried about stuff in our lives, about all the things we don’t have, all the things that aren’t going the way we think they should, all the things we don’t have control of. Then we get anxious; we fear; we complain. We live in a society that preaches that there’s never enough… never enough money, time, people, health, happiness, freedom, etc. “More, more, more” is the mantra that is constantly shoved into our ears and hearts, making it hard to be content with what we have much less thankful. We get so focused on the “not enough’s” that we become cynical and critical of others, complaining about all the things that we can’t control or think are going wrong. In our anxiety about not having enough, we start to fall into bad habits, listening to rumors, spreading misinformation, talking behind the backs of others, or just not caring. In the midst of this muttering mantra of “more” comes the apostle Paul’s call to “be thankful...Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Christ.” Do everything in Christ, giving thanks to God! Life in Christ is a life of thankfulness, a life lived in the Spirit’s gratitude that remembers that “enough is plenty.” This constant thanksgiving can be hard to do. It takes a willing heart and the readiness to practice giving thanks even in difficult times. What does living in the Spirit’s gratitude look like? Well, it pays attention to what it does have rather than getting sucked into the hole of scarcity. The Spirit’s gratitude sees problems not as roadblocks but as an opportunity to find another way of “doing everything in Christ’s name.” The Spirit’s gratitude gives thanks for the positives that can come even out of the toughest experiences. The Spirit’s gratitude sees everything as a possibility because nothing, even life out of death, is impossible with God. For in Christ, the glass is neither half-empty nor half-full; the glass is always overflowing with the abundant love of God and the power of new life that God shares with us every day. To practice letting the Spirit’s gratitude into your life, try repeating again and again a simple prayer like “God make me thankful for enough.” Try tuning out the messages of “not enough” by turning off the TV or at least muting it during the advertisements. Try counting your blessings by writing down all the things, no matter how small or weird, that you are grateful for. And then whenever you hear yourself complaining, stop and name those things you are most thankful for to break the pattern of complaint. And definitely try forgiveness, both accepting it and giving it, for it is only in the new life given in God’s forgiveness that we can truly understand what it means to be grateful for the grace God has given. Congregations can practice living in the Spirit of gratitude too. Instead of complaining about the changes happening, we can ask, “how can this help us know Jesus better?” Instead of beginning with the idea that time is scarce, we can begin by encouraging each other to see that, in thanksgiving to God, we will always have enough time to do what is important if we set priorities. Instead of thinking about what we don’t have or what someone else is doing that we don’t like, we can focus our faith on God and Christ’s love for us, from which nothing can separate us. Being a thankful congregation in the Spirit’s gratitude means that we don’t spend our time worrying about the people who aren’t here or the things we don’t have. Instead, a grateful congregation is excited about who IS here and what we DO have. A thankful church takes an inventory of its many gifts and assets and then it asks, what can we do to serve God’s kingdom with the abundance we DO have? No church can be everything to everybody. But all churches have a myriad of spiritual gifts and an abundance of God’s love to fuel them if only they’re willing to let go of their worries about not having enough and live out their faith in gratitude. So be thankful! And in every word and deed, give thanks to God for what God has done for you through his Son, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. In gratitude for you, Bishop Laurie What would your congregation or ministry do with $1 million dollars?
Would you be governed by the consumer culture that would drive you to use money for yourselves (our building, property, comfort)? Would you be driven by the myths of scarcity that tell you to save it for a rainy day, even if the hurricane is already blowing around you? Or would you choose to live a different way, God’s way, a way that seeks God’s reign by searching for the best ways possible to use the blessings you’ve received to serve God’s mission of sharing the good news, loving your neighbor and serving those in need? We live as consumers in a culture of scarcity, always worried about not having enough. In fact, there are three myths this culture of scarcity bombards us with: 1) there’s not enough to go around; 2) more is always better; 3) and that’s just the way it is. These myths cause us to constantly worry about resources, an anxiety that turns us into ourselves and drives us to act out of fear and seek our own personal desires. But God wants a different life for those who follow Christ. God wants us to live as citizens of Christ’s kingdom, following a way of faith, hope, love and generosity. “Do not worry about your life, what you will wear, eat or drink,” Jesus promises in his Sermon on the Mount. (Mt 6:25-34) “Seek God’s kingdom instead and trust in what God has already given you.” This doesn’t mean we stop eating, drinking or wearing clothing (please don’t! J). It means that in our daily encounter with Jesus, our lives are transformed so much that we get to stop worrying about having more, because when everyone is as generous as we’re called to be in Christ, everyone will have enough. That’s what happened to Zacchaeus of Jericho. One day he was a rich tax collector, short in stature, tall in wealth. Then from a branch on a sycamore tree he saw Jesus. And Jesus saw him. Jesus invited himself into Zacchaeus’ life and everything changed! Zacchaeus trusted Jesus so much that he gave away half of what he owned to those in need and used the rest to repent of his defrauding ways by giving back four times the amount he took. He stopped worrying about having more and used his million dollars to serve the mission of God’s reign in this world. In this transformation, salvation came to Zacchaeus’ house and he and his family lived in the new life Christ promises. (Lk 19:1-10) So what would you do with a million dollars? What will you do with the blessings you do receive, even if it doesn’t hit that million mark? During this time often devoted to stewardship, I encourage you to think outside the box of scarcity and imagine how you as individuals, congregations, and ministries can support God’s mission in the world. Think about the many ways the ELCA is already serving God’s mission through your congregation, your synod and the wider church: through your local food pantries or quilt-making or clothing drives; through the synod’s support of prison ministry, campus ministry, helping you find a pastor or visiting you in times of celebration or difficulty; through churchwide programs such as Lutheran World Hunger, Lutheran Disaster Relief, Young Adults in Global Mission, and many other opportunities to love and serve the weak, the lost, the hungry, the afraid, the marginalized and the forgotten among us in our communities, state, nation and world. Thank you for all of the ways you support the ELCA’s opportunities for doing God’s mission. For finally, that is what Jesus calls us to support, God’s mission to bring salvation to the whole world, especially those in need. A wonderful gift has been given to you and your congregation. You have been welcomed freely into God’s salvation, a relationship of new and transformed life in God’s kingdom. In this relationship, each of you is called to follow Christ and be a steward of God’s blessings to the world. And as followers of Christ you get to participate in God’s mission through your wise and hope-filled giving and service in God’s kingdom. Thank you for your continued support of God’s mission happening in your congregation/ministry, the Montana Synod, and the wider Church. Your gifts are appreciated! In Christ’s hope, Bishop Laurie What does it mean to welcome? Many of us say “All are Welcome!” to our congregations or ministries. But what does that mean?
According to Ruth Fletcher, in her book Thrive: Spiritual Habits of Transforming Congregations, there is a difference between being “friendly” and being “welcoming.” (pp. 75ff) Friendliness invites newcomers into what already exists and then expects them to change to fit into the current system. People in a friendly community say in subtle or not-so-subtle ways: “We’re glad you joined our family. But it’s OUR family and we hope you like the way we do things. If not, there’s the door.” Welcoming, on the other hand, integrates newcomers into the community by letting them be themselves and allowing them to belong as equal partners with gifts, ideas, and experiences to share. Welcoming is willing to explore the new opportunities that newcomers can offer. In a welcoming community, members say with everything they say and do: “We want you to share your gifts and we’re ready to be transformed by them.” Fletcher tells the story of a congregation whose members thought they were welcoming. {p.78} But as the newcomers began to take more responsibilities in fulfilling the mission of the congregation by trying new things and encouraging new ways of being community, the friendliness with which they were greeted when they arrived disappeared. Fletcher writes, “The established members complained that the women who had more recently come…didn’t comply with the rules of the church kitchen. Others grumbled about noisy, active children disrupting the Sunday service. When younger adults introduced a different kind of music, old-timers put up with it for a while, but soon grew angry about all the changes in the church. The atmosphere in the congregation grew tenser until the newer people gave up and left. Then the old-timers breathed a sigh of relief and the church returned to its comfortable former habits…” To Fletcher’s story, one might easily add the words “…and slowly died” because a congregation that does not find a way to be welcoming beyond friendliness will slowly dwindle away. In an article entitled “All are Welcome” in the March 2016 edition of The Living Lutheran, Wendy Healy quotes Brenda Smith, “People are looking for three things in a church. One, a warm community that loves and follows Jesus; two, a place where they can learn something; and three, a church that is doing something to transform the world.” To truly welcome people – both newcomers and established members – is to construct a WHOLE community that creates opportunities for these three things to happen in a life-giving, spirit-empowering way that recognizes and welcomes everybody’s gifts by “finding places where those gifts can best be used to serve the vision, mission, and values established by the whole congregation.” {Fletcher, p. 83) So how specifically can we go beyond friendliness to be truly welcoming in the Church? Here are three of many possible suggestions:
Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.” (Mt 10:40) Finally, welcoming people means welcoming them as if they are Christ, ready to be transformed by their presence among us. In Christ, Bishop Laurie My Aunt Shirley, before she died a few years ago, would often say “Be the one who makes someone smile today.” She would say this even as she battled cancer on and off for 20 years. And she would live it even as she went through round after round of horrible chemo and radiation. She was always able to bring a smile to my face and to the faces of those around her with her hope-filled faith and warm laughter. Even in her last days, her faith inspired her to smile into death’s face. And after she died, many who knew her named my Aunt Shirley a saint.
This Sunday we celebrate All Saints Sunday, the holy-day in the church year on which we give thanks for and honor all who have supported us in our faith lives before leaving us temporarily in death. All Saints Sunday is about remembering the dead who are no longer with us here on earth. It’s about paying tribute to those who have made a positive difference in our lives with Christ through their faith, love, and hope they shared with us. But All Saints Day is about more than just remembering the dead. It is ultimately about remembering the resurrection that has been promised to us in Jesus Christ. All Saints Day is about facing death head-on and smiling at it through our faith in Christ. It’s about waving good-bye to death as Jesus banishes it into oblivion. Finally, All Saints Sunday is about celebrating life, the abundant life that comes to us in God’s eternal City through the power of Christ’s resurrection from the cross. “The last enemy to be destroyed is death,” Paul reminds us in his first letter to the Corinthians. (1 Cor 15:26) Sometimes we forget that promise, that death is no longer a threat to us, that death in the end will be destroyed, that in Christ there is new life, an abundant new life in which what we fear is gone. In this new life, hatred is gone, greed, prejudice, fear, killing, violence, all gone. Disease is gone, death is gone, and all sources of sorrow have disappeared. Love and beauty and joy and peace will permeate the earth, filling the whole universe to the point of bursting. Life Abundant will saturate us in ways we can never imagine right now. And while we aren’t able to live this abundant life yet due to the distortion of sin, on All Saints Day we are called to seek God’s city in this messy world through a vision of faith, even if it only can be seen in a glass dimly, in tiny bursts of Christ’s light into our lives, in small glimpses of love and grace and mercy and hope happening around us. The vision of hope that we are reminded of by those who have gone before us points us in the direction God is calling us to live. And this vision redirects us toward love when we try to go a different way. This vision of God’s abundant life is one of the many gifts that the Spirit uses to empower our faith, encourage our hope and guide us toward love in the world. So during your commemoration of the saints this week, I invite you also to remember and celebrate the resurrection that is promised to us in Christ. For in Christ, we get to look into the face of death and laugh. May God comfort and support you as you remember those saints who have gone before us. In the new life of Christ, Bishop Laurie What lenses are you looking through? No, I’m not talking about contact lenses or glasses, bifocals or sunglasses. I’m talking about the lenses of life, the worldly lenses that color or cloud how we see what’s around us. These lenses can include the experience of our family of origin which helps interpret much of what we see. But there are other lenses through which we see the world: the narratives that come to us from the news or media programming we choose to watch/hear; the social media we choose to engage; the political viewpoints we choose to subscribe to; the peer groups we choose to hang out with. Each of these provide us with more or less healthy lenses by which to see, interpret and even judge the world.
Of course, all of us see the world through various lenses; no one sees anything except through the lenses we put on or are given to us. The question is which lenses are the followers of Christ called to wear? This question naturally leads us to other questions: through which lenses are we choosing to see the church’s activity? God’s activity? Through which lenses are we defining Jesus Christ’s call to follow him? Are we defining discipleship according to the lenses of social media or the news? Are we seeing God and God’s work in the world through lenses of worry, scarcity, fear, or anger? Are we seeing (and judging) the church through lenses of a specific political perspective? The apostle formerly known as Saul initially saw the newly emerging church and the Way of Jesus Christ through lenses defined by his religious education, his fear of the unknown, his anxiety that this new off-shoot of his tradition would corrupt him and his religion. (Acts 9:2) But all these lenses blinded him to the new way God was working in the world. In his blindness he was destructive, not only to the people who followed the new Way of Christ but to God’s message of good news proclaimed in Christ. It wasn’t until he was physically blinded on the road to Damascus, spent three days in prayer, and was healed by his enemy that Paul more clearly saw the world through the lens of Christ. And it changed Paul’s life forever. (Acts 9 and following.) Like Paul, we who are Christ’s followers are called on our roads to Damascus to open our eyes and see the world, including the church, through the lens of Christ and the new life he gives us. Instead of seeing and judging the church through the political, social, economic, or social media lenses that are so pervasive in our lives, we are called to see all of our society through the lens of our trust in our faithful God and our commitment to Christ. Instead of defining what it means to follow Christ according to the culture’s standards, we are called to live according to Jesus’ standards laid out in the Great Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the call to feed, give water to, welcome, clothe, care for, and visit those in need of God’s love and compassion no matter who they are…for they are all to be seen as Christ in our midst (Mt 25:31-46). Instead of seeing God’s work in our churches through lenses of suspicion and anger because they don’t match the other lenses we’ve chosen to wear, we are called to see through the lenses of faith, hope, love and the new life we’ve been given through the mercy and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. So like Paul, I call on you to let go of the lenses of the world that are directing you away from Christ’s Way and open your eyes and hearts to the fruit of the Spirit – joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These are the lenses, poured into us in our Baptism, shared in Holy Communion and the preaching of the Word, and set into our eyes by the Spirit that define, govern, and guide how we see the world and live in it as followers of Christ. Praise be to Christ for the new Way to see God’s world! Bishop Laurie I write this stuck in Columbus, MT thanking God for winter weather warnings and the technology that makes them possible! These warnings helped me prepare for a disruptive snow event so that my life might be a little safer and predictable if not controllable or convenient. But not all events are so predictable. In fact, our lives are full of unpredictable and uncontrollable change.
Change is hard. It upends our lives, makes us face the unknown, drives up our anxiety and fear. Humans like stability because it’s measurable, foreseeable, even controllable. When we know what to expect, we can relax and take comfort in the fact that nothing will threaten our existence at that moment. But when things change, all those expectations go out the window. Our worry levels rise and we’re left feeling like an uncontrolled life is an unsafe life. And yet change is life. And life is change. Without change there would be no life. Imagine a tulip bulb that didn’t change into a beautiful flower in the spring. Imagine the larches and the oaks that didn’t change their leaves in the fall. Imagine a chrysalis that doesn’t change into a butterfly. Or a newborn child who doesn’t grow into an adult. Life without change is not life at all. At best it’s a holding pattern; at worst, it is death itself. To truly live, to live in the full blessings of life that God wants for us, our lives must be transformed. We must rise to new life with Christ, a new life that necessarily means change. Following Jesus is hard. It’s radical. It’s frightening. It’s change. But finally, it is the only true and lasting life that matters. In Christ, you have been given the promise in your baptism and in the Lord’s Supper that in following Jesus, new life comes to you and for you. In the midst of your anxiety, the promises of Christ bring you hope for a new beginning. In the fear of change, the Holy Spirit inspires faith in the stability and safety only God can bring. In the midst of change’s deaths, new life blooms in you. “Be not afraid!” the angels cry. “Don’t worry!” Jesus proclaims. Christ’s new life is present in your lives even during winter storm warnings. For the transformation that comes in Christ means a new life for you and for the whole world. Let us pray…living God, although humans tried to inflict the ultimate change on your son, death on a cross, you raised him to new life. In this resurrection, change no longer represents death, but life. Open our hearts and minds to prepare our spirits for the transformation into the new life you give us in Christ. Amen. Bishop Laurie “I never dreamt…” I’ve heard these words a lot over the last week.
“I never dreamt there would be a 3-foot snowstorm with blizzard conditions in September,” I heard from folks in MT over the weekend. To those who suffered losses due to the storm, may God strengthen and support you during these times of recovery. “I never dreamt that I’d be able to be a pastor in the church.” I heard this again and again from seminarians and graduates who received the ELCA Fund for Leaders Scholarship at a banquet in Chicago last Friday. This scholarship from the ELCA pays full tuition for our future pastors, removing expense as a reason to not be able to go to seminary, and allows them to enter their parishes and ministries with far less student debt. “I never dreamt when I started the LPA program that I’d be sitting in Chicago with my bishop.” Wendy McAlpine, an LPA SAM from Sunburst, said this to me after receiving the Fund for Leaders Renewal Ministry Scholarship that is helping her to go through the TEEM program so that she can continue serving the mission of the gospel in Montana. “I never dreamt I’d be elected bishop,” many of my new colleagues and I said at our conference of bishops meeting this past week in Chicago. What things have you “never dreamt could happen to you?” That’s an odd question, right, since if you haven’t dreamt them, how can you know what they are? But even though we might have never dreamt them, I can assure you that the Holy Spirit has indeed dreamt them for us. “In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams,” Peter proclaims during his Pentecost sermon. (Acts 2:17) The Holy Spirit is working among us in the Montana Synod, stirring things up, blowing breezes and blizzards through congregations and ministries, dreaming dreams for us even when we can’t seem to dream them ourselves. The Holy Spirit is opening up new opportunities in the lives of our churches and creating new possibilities for us as the followers of Christ to do things we never dreamt could happen. We just need to “let go and let God” lead us in the direction the Spirit is dreaming us. For as long as we hold onto our anxieties and fears, our angers and distrust, our despair and division, the Spirit faces too many barriers to break through and lay dreams on our hearts, minds and spirits effectively. So I invite you to open yourself to the Spirit’s dreamings and let the hope of those Spirit-led dreams in. For I am living proof that the Spirit dreams us into possibilities we would never have dreamt for ourselves. In the same way the Holy Spirit dreamt you into electing me your bishop, dreamt financial support for future pastors, dreamt followers of Christ in this Synod into the LPA program, into the TEEM program and into leading congregations as pastors and deacons, the Holy Spirit is dreaming new possibilities for you. In the new life given to us in Christ, let us dream together the Spirit’s dreams into God’s world through faith, hope and love. Empowered in the Spirit’s dream, your bishop, Laurie Jungling What does it mean to be blessed? “God bless you,” we say when someone sneezes. “May God bless and keep you,” the worship leader pronounces at the end of worship. “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” the psalm writer states. (Ps 103) “I’ve been so blessed,” we proclaim when we see the goodness in our lives. The word blessing gets used a lot in many different ways in the Christian life, but what does it mean to be blessed?
Those of you who have received emails or letters from me may have noticed that I often close with some version of “Blessings to you” or “God bless you in your ministry.” For me that is no rote statement spun off without thought. “Blessing,” according to Old Testament scholar Claus Westermann, is the “quiet, continuous, flowing and often unnoticed working of God for life and vitality in the world.” Blessing, then, is life. But not just any life. It is God’s life, God’s livingness, vitalness, thriving, and growth that God gives as pure gift to each part of creation. This divine life goes beyond anything we can imagine, though our best picture of it is the abundant new life given to us in Christ and empowered in us as individuals and community by the Holy Spirit. So when you say “God bless you” to someone who sneezes, you are actually sharing God’s life with them. When I say “Blessings” at the end of my email, I am sharing God’s livingness with you. When Paul writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places…” (Eph 1:3) he is resharing the divine life with God that God has already given us in Christ in every spiritual blessing from heaven, claiming again his (and our) relationship of abundant life with God. Over the next months and years, the Montana Synod will be focusing on vitality: congregational vitality, ministry vitality, church vitality, discipleship vitality. In other words, we will be focusing on God’s blessings of life in our world and opening up our selves, our congregations and our communities to the continuous, flowing, life-creating and sustaining work of God in our midst. May God bless us with enlivened hearts and enlivened eyes to notice the divine life already working among us. In Christ's immeasurable blessing, Bishop Laurie |
Bishop Laurie Jungling
Elected June 1, 2019, Laurie is the 5th Bishop of the Montana Synod Archives
September 2022
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