There are moments when perspective changes and the world changes in some way. I saw the place where I live very differently tonight. Not my house or yard, Golden Spike is a picturesque place for certain. But the town of Spruce Grove finally found some beauty in my eyes.

I was on my way home from picking up milk, just around dusk. The lights had come on in the streets but it was still very bright. The combination of the lights and signs, with light blue and pink sky was striking. And the fields are starting to peak through the snow. The yellow wheat stocks in the white snow, along side street lights and colourful business signs. It was the details that caught me. It was the first time I had seen beauty in this highway town of box stores where I shop.

Long awaited yet never imagined is a line from my sermon today. I like it. It captures a sense of our waiting for something in life, something that can’t express. Spruce Grove was waiting for me to find its’ beauty, eventhough I wasn’t looking. Jesus waited for Martha and Mary to be allow themselves to he found in their grief, Lazarus in his tomb.

We spend a lot of time waiting unknowingly, and we are surprised by what finds us along the way. Jesus is ready wait in the details for us, even when we can imagine we are found there.

This is the first fall where my year seems to be ending. As a student, fall was always new — and hectic — but now I am living in a rhythm closer to the calendar year. I live with the seasons of the church which actually ends with the end of fall. I am finally feeling the wind down in harmony with nature.

As a preacher, I tend to speak against things like nostalgia and sentimentalism. In the Church, where meaning and symbolism are of utmost importance, nostalgia is usually a misdirected desire for the goodness of the past. I prefer words like Tradition and History which are as much about the future as they are the past.

Yet, there is something about fall, and particularly Thanksgiving, that draws you into these feelings and emotions. Fall itself is a death of summer so to speak. Nature seems old and dying. It is easily to slip into longing for the days of summer gone by. Winter is death itself, and it also brings a certain newness as sometimes we need death in our lives to move on.

It was nice to laugh with family this weekend (and get a good night sleep finally). When it was all over, I immediately wanted it not to be. This is the root of nostalgia, longing for the past. And maybe some days this isn’t so bad.

But when it keeps us from moving on,  the leaves stay orange and yellow all the time. The world feels old and dying year round. I am excited for Advent this year. It is going to feel like something new, really new, maybe for the first time ever.

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The photo is actually new. From a photo shoot, of which one photo will make it into Canada Lutheran.

Okay, so this is a bit of a-round-about-way of getting into this idea.

But, I was inspired to write something here after reading Ryan Andersen’s thoughts on this topic AND after reading Canada’s Finance minister’s ridiculous claim that if opposition parties cause an election, that 400,000 jobs might be lost.

I have always been kind of annoyed by people who say “I am not religious, I am spiritual”. It is a populous idea… and I happen to be a professional in the field of religion. I can guarantee that those who make that claim do not have a very good understanding of religion. And “I read all the holy books and decided for myself” or, “I tried them all out” or “I grew up ______ and found out it wasn’t for me” do not count as good understandings, or understandings at all really (post a comment if you disagree).

However, my annoyance is starting to lessen. For you see, I am starting to realize that people who make that claim are actually looking for the things that I would say religion, tradition, and faith communities offer — in their best incarnation.

The loud voice of fundamentalist Christians coming form the US would drive me there too, if I didn’t know better. And the same kind of fear generating rhetoric is showing up in Canadian politics. Whether Jim Flaherty actually believes that an election will cause 400, 000 real people to loss their jobs, I have no idea. But the attempt at making Canadians fearful of this… well it is despicable. It’s no better than the kind of statements we hear coming from the south that claim: Obama is a muslim, illegal immigrants are abducting people in Mexico, or that the ‘not-mosque’ at ‘not-ground’ zero is a terrorist HQ.

If this is the voice that is speaking for “organized” Christianity, I would be “not religious” in a heart beat.

But let me say it: That is not religion. That is politics couched in religion. That is politicians taking the low road by terrifying and angering their constituents. It is playing with strong emotions that people have about their faith for political gain.

Its en vogue in the Church right now to be worried about attendance decline (and to hope that the newest magic bullet program will solve this problem). I don’t worry about that because its a symptom of a larger problem. As a North American society we are acting like 9-year-olds with ADHD. It doesn’t help that the news jumps from Lindsay Lohan’s arrest to Christine O’Donnel (Sarah Palin’s mini-me) to tax cut bills to blocking “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” repeal to the Facebook movie, like the Dog from Up notices squirrels. And this truly worries me. We are losing our ability to think deeply, to engage fully and learn reflectively about the world.

“I am not religious, I am spiritual” is a symptom too.

The disease is forgetting that we are on this planet together, and that life is bigger than 4 year election cycles or whatever reality tv crack is hip this week (and I am looking at you Dancing with the Stars). The disease is historical, cultural, and religious amnesia. The disease is that most of us think we know all we need to know about religion at the age of 13, and this probably goes the same for family systems, politics, economics and social theory. The world is much more profound than Facebook status update and figuring that out again is the first step of societal recovery. I don’t have the answers, but I know that Canadians won’t lose 400,000 thousand jobs for using their brains to decide our future.

He has written a book called The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. Its a very interesting idea. From what I understood from the interview, the argument is multi tasking and the internet is turning our brains into mush… well not quite. But we are losing the ability to think deeply, because we practice surface level information gathering so much. We live in a world of sound bites, and the more we multi task the worse we become!!!

I am going to get my hands on this book and do some deep thinking with it right away!

I think there is something else going on in the world of online thought sharing and that is facebook and twitter are killing the casual blogger. The sad thing is those platforms don’t provide for the depth of insight and interest that blogs did. I think people are interesting, extremely interesting. And having the chance to read their organized thoughts and ideas is a great insight into people you know and people don’t.

If blogs are like fine dinning, facebook is like fast food and twitter is like crack. They don’t allow for depth of conversation. They are teaching us to think in ideas that are no longer that 160 characters… Yet the world is full of things that need so much more than that to express or understand.

Yes, its weird to blog about blogging, but I think this is bigger than that. Its about society moving sound bite thinking. We have long been hearing our news, getting our advertising and receiving information in sound bit form. If you can’t get someone’s attention in a few words, then you can get it at all. But now we are starting to think in that amount of space and its scary.

Part of my job… part of my vocation! is to be a crafter of words. Words are the tool I use each and every day. I study them, I write them, I speak them… I even find my faith in a God who is WORD.

So what’s the solution? I have no idea. I think this movement into sound bite culture over word culture is one with irreversible inertia.  Yet as the Church, perhaps our calling is, as much as ever, to continue being a proclaimer of words. To do what we have done for 2000 years, for 6000 years. To tell of a God who spoke the world into being and who spoke Christ into creation.

Well… I think this post makes 17, I am almost caught up to July 2008.

The Rev

This is my internship supervisor’s blog, it’s a new one with some interesting thoughts! So check it out!

62 year ago, my grandfather was getting ready to be ordained. His anniversary of ordination is June 13th. I wonder what he was thinking, or doing. What he nervous? What he excited?

Almost a year ago, I was ordained and officially began working as a pastor. And it may be the only thing in my life that has actually lived up to expectations, and I can at least say that now in all honesty. Who knows? Maybe I won’t feel that way in the future, but for now things are great.

Anyways, its late and I have to do my thing tomorrow. But I just thought a few thoughts with things done ahead of time might be in good order.

Good night!

You can find the blog here: http://abtsynod2010.blogspot.com/

Here is my first post: As I write this, I am sitting staring out at the Church where I serve as pastor from the parsonage. Its a view that urges me to contemplate how I got here. This will be my first convention as a “rostered delegate”. At the 2008 convention I camd as a seminary intern, and at the 2006 convention, I was a youth delegate (well… youthish I guess).

Pastor Erik

The last two years of “right wing” complaining about Barack Obama have shown what the loudest voice of “Christianity” is in the US is actually believing in. The Nation is God, forget all that stuff about the Trinity, Jesus, the Bible, the creeds, or the Church. Belief and faith in the Nation.

Regardless of who the president is, regardless of how much turmoil there is the economy or with other nations or with Health Care. The United States is not God. Folks on both sides of the issue are guilty of worshiping the nation.

As a Canadian, perhaps I don’t have the right to criticize how the US does politics, but as a Pastor I think I need to say, that for all its rhetoric about the separation of church and state, that so many in US have blurred the lines of that separation so much that the president is the pope, and the citizens are its worshipers. Maybe this is why people are so polarized. Politics can be worked out, but matters of faith we are told not to compromise.

So my Pastoral advice, take 5 minutes to think about what faith is really about, and what it means to live in a country. They are different.

*Rant off*