From the Pastor

On reading the mind of God:
(or how Studebaker taught me to think about the future)

I had driven the hundreds of miles back to my home town to visit my mother some years ago. I had recently purchased a new car and wanted to show it off. I pulled into the drive, honked the horn to announce my arrival home. Instead of coming out to the car, my mother stopped just outside the door, stared down the drive at the new Honda, and stated for the neighborhood to hear, “Dad never drove one of those!”

Pastor Dave Not a “hello” not a “welcome home”, greeted me. The vehicle that carried me was alien, maybe evil, and certainly not the right name at all. My presence next to the car was welcome, of course, but in that one stare from the steps, heaven and hell met and determined that the car was damned. It made me wonder just a little if I should have made another choice. Doubt can ruin a perfectly good choice and sew bad seeds into the soil of future ones.

We are all creatures of habit, and even more of ‘brand’. Even the youngest or most innovative in our midst are bound to the tried and tested conventions that drive the latest “new and improved” products. We might say we love new things, but only if they ‘marry into the family’ of what we already know. New things can’t be too new or we’ll reject them. Such things tend to frighten all of us, and once we’re scared of something it becomes very hard to convince us not to be afraid. Fear is the killer of futures.

My father loved Studebakers. Though once a thriving company, it folded after years of spinning it’s wheels over lost glory. My father bought them for years afterward, and for my mother, loyal to his memory, all cars would forever be compared to Studebakers. The thing and the brand were the same. But ‘brands’ that last also reinvent themselves because the times are reinventing us. We may think we’re the same as we were yesterday, but we’re not. The quality of the product is everything. If It’s good, the qualities of the patron rise, too.

Time and again, from the Old Testament to the New we will find examples of the mind of God offering up something new at just the right time. Sometimes God waits until the former ways of doing things are exhausted. Other times God surprises humanity by afflicting us amid our comfort.

Whether He is shouting or whispering to us God is ever showing us the secrets of his future in the changes of the present. Sometimes we see them coming; often we do not. But whether we are ready or surprised, God appears in the crisis of the moment, in the difficult choices we make, and in the ways we stretch our understanding to address something new. Every day, God is offering you and me the chance to reinvent ourselves, not on the outside, but deep, deep within at the level of our deepest qualities. This is not about God changing his mind, but changing us.

Soon a new house will arise across the street where a parsonage stood decades ago. Soon, new friends will sit in a pew where a departed friend sat for decades. Soon, new companions will ask us if we belong to First Lutheran or to Jesus? They will want to know if we are loyal to a certain brand, or to what truth demands from people of faith in our times? God is in the mix of all these changes but not for change itself, but to make sure that the qualities of dignity, grace, and compassion are at the core of the newest edition of ourselves. We may hate much of what changes and be suspicious of what we do not understand, but our mission is to lend integrity to what ever comes.

You and I are here as witnesses not only of what God has done, but to what God is about to do.

In the coming month a resurrection will take place. Easter will come again.
But this year it will be different, as the resurrected Jesus is different than the crucified one. How we shall appear, what shape we shall have, or even new name in the coming years is unknown, but the quality of faith shall remain the same.

Pastor Dave

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