Graduation Celebration

This week in church I called our seniors who had graduated up before the church. I had a short video of their parents saying how proud they were. It included pictures of them growing up. After the video I explained that their next steps may take them too far for them to continue attending our church on a weekly basis. I explained that I called them up because I wanted the congregation to see their faces, so they could reach out to them. I wanted the congregation to ensure that they knew that we loved them, and that they would always have a home here, no matter where they go, or how long they are away. We celebrated with them. We showed them love. As I received feedback this week it seems this was one of the most powerful things we did in church this week. It built the church up, it built the kids up, it built their families up. Don't miss the chance to do that this summer!

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Death Will Lose it's Sting

Our reading from the Narrative Lectionary this week is 1 Corinthians 15:51-57. In these verses, Paul reveals a mystery, that in the end some will be transformed, given a new body, instead of facing death. In other words death is not one of life's two certain terms. It seems taxes may be the only guarantee. "...in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes ." - Benjamin Franklin. Ok, all jokes aside, these verses are difficult to read. Paul looks forward to a time when death will have no victory, it will have lost its sting. But today, we are in the middle of a pandemic, surrounded by death. Many are scared for their lives, or their loved ones, and too many have already been lost. Death does not seem to have lost its sting at all, it feels as if it is closing in. When I worked in wilderness therapy I remember holding a child who was desperately trying to kill himself. We cried together as he struggled to end it, and I struggled

The Return Threshold

As we come near the end of our weekly series on the Hero's Journey, today we will cover "The Return Threshold". In this stage, the Hero has succeeded in their quest and now they are coming back to their old world. Joseph Campbell calls this the "ordinary world". The return to the ordinary world usually includes some type of challenge. Sometimes an enemy must be challenged, but sometimes the enemy is the ordinary world itself. As we have followed the hero's journey we have seen the hero change, what was once important is no longer important. While the hero has changed, the ordinary world has not. The ordinary world holds values that the returning hero has abandoned for something greater. This can cause tension as the hero tries to return as a changed person. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, we see the Hobbits finally return to their home in the Shire. Unfortunately in their absence Saruman and his orcs have taken over the Shire and must be defeat

Master of Two Worlds

This week we come to the second to last stage of the Hero's Journey. Campbell called this stage "The Master of Two Worlds". In this stage, the hero tries to integrate what they learned and gained on their journey with their old "ordinary" world. Albert Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." This explains the challenge the hero must face in this stage. All that they learned and gained must be fully mastered and the test of this mastery is being able to use it in the ordinary world. They must simplify it so that the uninitiated can benefit from it, just as Einstein encouraged the mastery of complex ideas into simple explanations. In the Star Wars Trilogy, this stage happens off-screen after the film is over, but before the new movie begins. We learn in the newest trilogy that Luke created a school for Jedi, taking the wisdom he gained from his journey and sharing it with others. In

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