Eternity Here and Now

On this day Norbert Johnson was laid to rest, a dear friend and colleague in ministry. Though not at his funeral in person, we were there in heart. And God gave us once again not only the hope of eternal life after death, but a fresh awareness of it here and now.

A warm setting sun
glistens on waving
branches of hemlock
as if pronouncing
its benediction
on all living things.

My soul comes alive
with the shimmering
as memories flow
in both mind and heart
from roots in hist’ry
to wings they supply.

From regions beyond
comes the awareness
that eternity
is nearer than life—
God’s love manifest
within our being,

So little a thing
it seems, this vision,
yet full of wonder:
all in a moment
we are giv’n to see
and grasp the Kingdom.

Not just someday soon
but in this moment--
more than a foretaste
of things yet to be--
eternity here,
full of shimm’ring life.

Hembygden 5/14/09

An Exclusive RootedWings Interview with Glen V. Wiberg on the Preaching Office

Glen Wiberg has issued through Covenant Pulications this year a treasure meant for believers af all kinds--clergy and layity alike, addressing an office that has been central both in his personal sense of call to the ministry and to life in the Covenant Church from its beginning.

What is required of one who would proclaim the Word of God, and thus be a spokesperson for him? And what is necessary for all those who listen to that proclamation? For nearly sixty years Glen's primary thrust in minsitry has been to wrestle with those questions, hoping to be a window through which people might encounter God and come alive in him.

In proclaiming the Word, administering the sacraments, and pursuing creatively the art both of of worship planning and leading, Glen has proved himself through strenuous disciplines of mind and heart to be a living reminder of what Housing the Sacred requires. The book itself is available through Covenant Bookstore. An exclusive thirty-minute RootedWings interview of its esteemed author and my dear friend, follows. Listen to and ponder what is offered here of both wisdom and challenge. And then, whether as preacher or listener, take seriously and personally the author's last bit of encouraging advice, a sign of his trust in you and the Spirit: "Proceed!"

'Be Still, and Know That I Am God'

All the beauty surrounding us these days in Minnesota--replete as nature is with the fresh greens of Spring and the wakening shoots from earth that soon will burst into bud, the Swedish hymn comes to mind, "Now Comes the Time for Flowers" (The Covenant Hymnal: A Worshipbook No. 646). Children all over Scandinavia sing it on the day of school closing each year, loving and anticipating their summer break. It is park of their cultural tradition.

The English text, translated some years ago by my brother Zenos, invites us to the same kind of celebration. "Come near, you summer hours, earth's grasses recreate," and "We hear the bird song ringing, a many-throated laud, shall not our tongues be singing our praise to Father God?" For the Christian, Spring is one more reminder of the divine reality out of which all blessings come, our Triune God at work!

Great Insight!

Discussing Barbara Brown Taylor's The Luminous Web the other night, subtitled Essays on Science and Religion, I was taken by her sense, shared by many on both sides of that seemingly impossible divide, that the distinction between scientific and religious knowledge is not as clear as it once was. She quotes one scientist who holds that "the common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate."

"As a believer in one God,"she writes, "I think everything is connected to everything else. What is exciting to me is that believers in science are beginning to say the same thing--not the God part but the connection part.

"In Sunday school," she continues, "I learned to think of God as a very old white-bearded man on a throne, who stood above creation and occasionally stirred it with a stick. When I am dreaming quantum dreams, what I see is an infinite web of relationship, flung across the vastness of space like a luminous net."

Throughout this fascinating book, "relationship" seems a key word. As all life in nature is related, even energies at great distance from each other, so ought we be related who study it--properly humble before its mystery, both factual and confessional, thus able to address each other from our vantage points without disrespecting the other. There is but one truth just as there is one God who, as the Apostle Paul says is "over all, and in all, and through all."

When your really think about it, how much of the heat generated in scientific/religious conflicts is really an expression of pride on both sides, each seeking subservience more than light? If truth be one, as we believe, is there any one so in touch with the whole of it that he or she has no need to learn from another? Science in pursuit of the truth is having increasingly, it seems, to deal with mysteries beyond its reach. And we religious types often hide from the same mysteries by offering facile answers to complex problems thinking thereby to defend God, who does not need our defense.

Sitting awhile before a picture like the one above, taken by the Hubbell Telescope from space, would do all of us good if what we are really seeking is truth and not our own advantage. Parabolically, wouldn't it be interesting to know if the divides between exponents of science and religion are due more to our distance in loving and humble relationship with each other than they are to matters of either fact or faith. Maybe God is teasing us into the kind of humility that awe alone creates in those seeking greater understanding on both sides.