This Week's Sermon: "Healing Our Image of God"

Genesis 1:24-31

God said, “Let the earth produce every kind of living thing: livestock, crawling things, and wildlife.” And that’s what happened. 25 God made every kind of wildlife, every kind of livestock, and every kind of creature that crawls on the ground. God saw how good it was.

26 Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image to resemble us so that they may take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth.” 27 God created humanity in God’s own image, in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and master it. Take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and everything crawling on the ground.”

29 Then God said, “I now give to you all the plants on the earth that yield seeds and all the trees whose fruit produces its seeds within it. These will be your food. 30 To all wildlife, to all the birds in the sky, and to everything crawling on the ground—to everything that breathes—I give all the green grasses for food.” And that’s what happened. 31 God saw everything he had made: it was supremely good. There was evening and there was morning: the sixth day. (Common English Bible)

“Reconnecting with a Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Three

At Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the preeminent memorial to the Jewish Holocaust, there is a term for non-Jews who helped save, shelter, or rescue Jews from the Holocaust during the Second World War: Righteous Among the Nations.

The names of the Righteous Among the Nations currently number in the tens of thousands—over twenty-six thousand as of this year—but I want to tell you about two of them from an obscure Greek Ionian island named Zakynthos.

When the Nazi occupiers of Greece came for the 275 Jews who lived on Zakynthos, the latter were successfully hidden amid a network of mountain villages. The mayor of Zakynthos, Loukas Karrer, was ordered at gunpoint to produce a roster of the island’s Jews. The list was presented to the Germans by the Greek Orthodox bishop Chrysostomos, and it contained but two names: Mayor Karrer and Chrysostomos himself. In handing over the list, Chrysostomos reportedly said, “Here are your Jews. If you choose to deport the Jews of Zakynthos, you must also take me, and I will share their fate.”

All 275 of Zakynthos’s Jews survived the war.

There is an epilogue to this story—eight years after the war ended, an earthquake devastated the island. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial andMuseum, the first aid vessel to arrive came from Israel, bearing the message, “The Jews of Zakynthos have never forgotten their mayor or their beloved bishop and what they did for us.”

In a war in which the image of so many a European to so many a Jew, a Romani, a disabled or gay person, was that of a banal, murderous monster, atoning for that image has been paramount in Germany’s history. Willy Brandt’s spontaneous act of kneeling at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the conversion of the grounds surrounding Hitler’s bunker and chancellery into a memorial site, all these different acts of atonement mean a great deal, and yet, it is the memories that we often reconnect with that move us to action—the memory of a saintly bishop or a courageous mayor, or, here in church, the memory of a God whose image was made in love, rather than wrath.

This is a new sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.

If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.

We began this series two weeks ago with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in My Bedroom,” and then last week we heard a passage from the second chapter, “Finding Shalom. This, then, is an excerpt from Carol’s third chapter, “Healing Our Image of God,” which takes place after a health scare for her father, whose abusive relationship with her underlines vast swaths of her book:

I had to rewire my brain, so that my belly was in on the heady message that God loved me, and so it would be okay to love God. It couldn’t happen in the church I served, because in that sanctuary, I was so worried about everyone gathered, it was hard to concentrate on my own work.

So I drove to the giant stone structure of the National Cathedral…If you think of a cathedral as the shape of a cross, the gathering was clustered at the heart of the beams. The priest and musicians stood as the people formed a “U” shape around them. Since there were plenty of vacant back seats, it was easy for me to slip into one and begin chanting with those gathered without much notice:

Bless the Lord, my Soul.

And bless God’s holy name.

Bless the Lord, my soul.

Who leads me into life.

…

Though the act of singing appeared simple, I knew a complicated healing process had begun—physically and spiritually—as we joined in the repetition. We imagined a compassionate God as we sang our prayer, and through that process we cleared out new paths of life in our minds.

Imagining a compassionate God should be so extraordinary a circumstance for any of us, and yet it often is precisely that: extraordinary. And were that so simply for the sole reason that God is indeed extraordinary, then I could end this sermon right now.

But that reality is true not just because God is in fact extraordinary, but because we are not taught of such extraordinary compassion and, equally crucially to go and emulate such compassion ourselves.

“God created humanity in God’s own image; in the divine image God created them, male and female God created them,” writes the priestly author of Genesis 1.

And then God blessed them, intones our scribe, and saw that it was good. Not mediocre, not “meh,” not adequate or fair-to-middling. Good. Very good, even. God saw that we are good.

God blesses God’s own image, for that which is created in God’s likeness is good in God’s sight.

Yet what image do we project, as the church, as a nation, as humanity itself? When we elevate people who get on television and into books to say that God shows blessing not through the fruits of the spirit, but through worldly wealth and possessions, what image is the church projecting?

When we elevate a message taught by preachers who emphasize that if you are beaten or battered or abused that it is a part of God’s cosmic plan and that you had best submit to it, what image is the church projecting?

And when we elevate to the presidency someone who decides to call another man something unprintable over a peaceful protest—whether you agree with that protest or not—what image is the nation projecting to people for whom United States history is not something to be proud of, but a long, painful story of enslavement, conquest, and, yes, abuse?

The image of God, of our communities, we tend to make it about ourselves. My New Testament professor in college said that we have this tendency to make God into an idealized version of ourselves, that we make God in our image rather than the other way around. There’s a word for that—idolatry. And it is something we are exhorted against in the first two of the Ten Commandments—that we shall have no other gods before God, and that we shall not make to God any idol. A god in our image that we then project is one such graven image. It is one such idol.

The image we project to survivors of all manner of abuses—spiritual, emotional, and physical—matters. It matters for any chance of reconciliation, it matters for any hope of honoring and acknowledging truth, and it matters for the future of our communities—including the church.

The courage demonstrated by the mayor and bishop of Zakynthos reverberated throughout the future, not just in the Jewish aid response to the earthquake that struck it eight years later, but in the form of the hundreds of lives saved who went on to have lives and children of their own, and those children’s children, all the way down to the present day.

So it was, and shall be, with God. God created us in the divine image, in the imago dei, and that too reverberates throughout the millennia, to us, and to our children, and our children’s children, and long into that future.

May those generations of the future find and have for themselves a church worthy of the God-image that dwells deep within them.

May we, the church of the present, be the ones to ensure that eventuality.

And may the churches of both present and future days be all the better for having done so.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington 

September 24, 2017 

This Week's Sermon: "Finding Shalom"

John 20:19-29

It was still the first day of the week. That evening, while the disciples were behind closed doors because they were afraid of the Jewish authorities, Jesus came and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. When the disciples saw the Lord, they were filled with joy. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.” 22 Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t forgiven.”

24 Thomas, the one called Didymus, one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe.” 26 After eight days his disciples were again in a house and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus entered and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand into my side. No more disbelief. Believe!” 28 Thomas responded to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus replied, “Do you believe because you see me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.” (Common English Bible) 

“Reconnecting with a Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Two

One of the best storytellers the church has is the author and novelist Karen Spears Zacharias, who, in her 2006 book Where’s Your Jesus Now: Examining How Fear Erodes Our Faith, conveys this story (truncated here for time) about growing up in the church and attending a Bible study on Revelation:

I was preparing for my freshman year at high school…Like most girls that age, I was anxious about my future…That anxiety reached a fever pitch when I was invited to join a youth Bible study group, sponsored by Grace Baptist Church. I’d been attending the church on my own most of the summer…For two weeks in late summer, the youth of Grace met at a picnic table under sap-scabbed pines at a state park as our youth pastor led us in a chapter-by-chapter study of Revelation. It wasn’t long after that study ended that the nagging nightmares began.

Insomnia set in. I was plagued by an overpowering sense of imminent doom. I grew scared of my own shadow…For the rest of that summer and throughout much of the next few years, I was on locust alert. All owing to my own diligent study of the Word…

No doubt, I’d still be cowering under an umbrella on sunny days if I hadn’t come face-to-face with God under the hood. Cautiously, at first, then with more daring, I pressed in, demanding to know, c’mon, God, who are you really? Thankfully, he was nothing like what I had envisioned him to be.

The things we are told as children about God can make or break our connection to God and our relationship with the church. Treat such a sacred and profound responsibility with the care and love it demands, and it makes the walking in Christ’s footsteps for a lifetime immeasurably easier. For it is not as though the church being derelict with that responsibility makes it impossible for a child to love God, but it can take a far more conscious effort, and that is an effort we must be ready to give.

This is a new sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.

If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.

We began this series last week with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in My Bedroom,” and this, then, is an excerpt from her second chapter, “Finding Shalom:”

I’ve been tempted to abandon God altogether; yet, I stayed.

Why didn’t I leave the spiritual life? Why didn’t I flee and embrace atheism? Was I like an assaulted spouse who remained inexplicably bound in a relationship that caused brutal pain?

I wasn’t afraid to ask the questions or deal with the consequences if I eventually found religion unbearable. It’s just that when someone complains of religious wounds, we’re often told to quit going to church and disconnect from spiritual practices. No doubt this works for some people, but others see the world through an irremovable religious lens. Asking us to stop believing and practicing would be so unnatural that it would cause certain blindness. It would be like demolishing a musician’s piano, breaking an artist’s brushes, or denying an engineer’s numbers. Some of us have a spiritual or theological orientation, and to eschew that would make us incomplete. Like the wise man at that party, we’ve found that we need to make amends with our past rather than severing it.

Making amends with the past involves making peace with our present, for it is by our past that we arrive at our present. It is hardly ever easy—amends for deep and lasting wounds seldom are, which is why it is so deliberately approached in the Twelve Steps—but it is so very necessary to the process of finding shalom, a Hebrew word that literally means ‘peace.’

Consider, then, the greeting that Jesus gives to His disciples in this post-resurrection appearance of His in John 20: “Peace—shalom—be with you!” These are followers of His who have just endured horrific spiritual and emotional anguish at the death of their teacher and Messiah, and even though Jesus has no amends to make to them, He still wishes peace for them.

Peace in the wake of trauma is not a covering-up, whitewashing, or a sweeping under the proverbial rug of that trauma—that almost always compounds the pain over time and is a sin in its own right.

No, for peace to occur, a reckoning must often take place. Much like ripping the band-aid off of a cut, the initial jolt of pain may be a deterrent to doing so, but in the long run, it is the better course.

That reckoning for one disciple, Thomas, is just beginning. So dispirited was he by the crucifixion that even the report back to him from the disciples present here in this passage does nothing for him; he must see Jesus for himself and place his hands upon Jesus’s wounds in order to believe.

Thomas, then, is exactly who we should be emulating from this passage. He is honest about what he needs and that he is unable in the moment to take the disciples’ word alone. Thomas often gets fitted for a black hat, but if there were more of Thomas’s honesty in the church, the world would, I imagine, be a better place for it. I think this is at least a little bit of why Jesus entertains this need of Thomas’s, and peace is made for the doubting Apostle as well.

Jesus has that patience with each of us as we each bind ourselves from the cuts, abrasions, and lacerations that have been inflicted upon us, both within and outside of the church. But precisely because Jesus does this for us, we must be honest in the church about how we wound when we should heal, and cut when we should bind.

There are so many ways in which we do that, but fundamentally, the common thread among them tends to be, I think, when we prioritize doctrine and belief over right relationship. Think of Karen’s story: the need to push a particular (and misguided, but that’s another can of tuna—again, relationship over doctrine) Bible study of Revelation in particular, for children who may not have been ready for its imagery and actual message, stayed with her and impacted her profoundly, just as the knowledge that his Lord had just been crucified stayed with and impacted the apostle Thomas.

Carol’s story of enduring abuse both within her church and within her family is a story of how the former can enable the latter, how unhealthy religion can enable an unhealthy home. Yet she so vividly writes of her need to stay within religion, within a right relationship with God, as well.

And as Carol describes, for many, most, or even nearly all of us here, that right relationship with God is irresistible. We are drawn to God like a fish to water, magnets to metal, and the Mariners to losing (I don’t feel good about that joke…way too easy).

Can we get out of our own way, then, in that relationship with God, instead of complicating it with doctrine that we insist is essential but is anything but, and in point of fact often does real and lasting harm to people? The church’s attitude towards women dissuaded Lord only knows how many generations of female preachers and teachers, and it still silences the voices of women who must face down abuse and are told by the churches they trust and love to simply grin and bear it.

The church’s use of doctrine, and maladapting it to say that God caused the HIV/AIDS crisis as a divine punishment, did and continues to do lasting damage to our LGBTQ neighbors.

And even when we insist on things as small as what we’d like you to wear, or not wear, to church, or whether or not we sit down with you in a pew or at the table, we send a strong message of who we include and exclude. It is why so many churches, including ours, have at one point or another pushed away millennial (the generation, not the theological end-times belief) Jesus followers.

None of that communicates Jesus’s “Peace be with you” greeting to His disciples. Yet we still call ourselves Disciples of Christ. Can we find shalom, this divine peace, together? Are we even capable of so dramatic and life-changing an undertaking?

I have to believe that we are. But it sometimes involves that ripping off of an emotional or spiritual band-aid.

The Good News is, though, that reconciliation can still happen despite our woundedness. Such was the case for Jesus and Thomas. Such could have been the case even for Judas if he, like Thomas, fell before Jesus calling out to Him, “My Lord and my God” in repentance.

And such might still be the case for the church and the world.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

September 17, 2017

Original image from Shutterstock

This Week's Sermon: "A Tree Grows in My Bedroom"

Genesis 21:22-34

 At that time Abimelech, and Phicol commander of his forces, said to Abraham, “God is with you in everything that you do. 23 So give me your word under God that you won’t cheat me, my children, or my descendants. Just as I have treated you fairly, so you must treat me and the land in which you are an immigrant.” 24 Abraham said, “I give you my word.” 25 Then Abraham complained to Abimelech about a well that Abimelech’s servants had seized. 26 Abimelech said, “I don’t know who has done this, and you didn’t tell me. I didn’t even hear about it until today.” 27 Abraham took flocks and cattle, gave them to Abimelech, and the two of them drew up a treaty.[c] 28 Abraham set aside, by themselves, seven female lambs from the flock. 29 So Abimelech said to Abraham, “What are these seven lambs you’ve set apart?” 30 Abraham said, “These seven lambs that you take from me will attest that I dug this well.” 31 Therefore, the name of that place is Beer-sheba[d] because there they gave each other their word. 32 After they drew up a treaty at Beer-sheba, Abimelech, and Phicol commander of his forces, returned to the land of the Philistines. 33 Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-sheba, and he worshipped there in the name of the Lord, El Olam. 34 Abraham lived as an immigrant in the Philistines’ land for a long time. (Common English Bible)

“Reconnecting with a Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week One

I began last week’s sermon that tied off our series on the judges with a history lesson from the mid-1800s. Today, as we start a brand-new sermon series, let’s begin with an even deeper history lesson.

When I say “the Sahara” to you, you probably automatically think “the desert.” (Or, alternatively, if you’re a real jazz geek, an album by Russ Freeman and the Rippingtons.)

Yet it was not always so, even just a few thousand years before the story of Abraham that we read about today. Because the earth is capable of wobbling in its orbit, the area of the Sahara desert vacillates between desert and grassland across 23,000-year cycles. I learned this week that we are about 7,000 years into the current desert cycle, leaving another 16,000 years of desert on tap before the region might shift into a grassland again. My understanding is that these orbital wobbles affect the entire world, not just the Sahara region, so this is simply the particular effect it has on the Sahara.

Such scientific understanding has, for me, never taken away from God’s creative abilities. Quite the contrary, it adds to my belief in God, and my wonder that God was able to create a world—and the vast universe beyond it—so complex and marvelous to behold. God created a world for us that takes the long game, even as we are only ever really focused on the short-term, like a desert that to us will only ever be a desert.

But looking at the longer, bigger thread is an imperative for us, and not just because God so created the world thusly. God also created us thusly, and sometimes, like the desert, it takes many, many years for us to change from a desert that has been scorched time and again into something that has become lifegiving. That, I think, is true for us as people, but also true for us as a church.

This is a new sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church hurts.

If that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on being better and doing church together.

This, then, is an excerpt from her first chapter, “A Tree Grows in My Bedroom:”

Something grew in the room beside my bed and bookshelves. It was a tree—a spiritual tree but still vivid to me. The gnarled, twisting roots burrowed deep into the rug and the foundation, and they kept plunging, through the earth’s crust and into the mantle. I could feel the branches hunched with the weary exhaustion of carrying the weight of the world for so many years, while the hardy trunk looked as if it had stood up to the most bullying hurricanes.

If I could get a good look at its vivisection, I had no doubt that the rings would prove its ancient history. But I had no desire to cut it down. Instead, I imagined plucking a great piece of fruit from its drooping limb and biting into it. It would be bursting with intense hybrid flavors, a genetic splicing of an apple tree with horseradish…

As I chewed on that fruit, it wasn’t as if the peace lulled me into complacency and made me want to stay in the house. Instead, it gave me a connection with God and strength to leave when I could.

The tree that Carol conjures up for us in these pages is a tree so wizened and sturdy that it, like God, like the deserts and grasslands that God has created, is fully capable of playing the long game. The fruit it offers is a peace that comes from such longevity, much as we may try to resist it ourselves with each new quick fix for whatever we are told ails our lives. And yet, what God offers to us is eternal. We know this from what Abraham’s own story in Genesis 21 offers us.

Abraham’s own life is one of playing the long game as well—he and Sarah are advanced in years and remain faithful despite a lack of children even though the desire to have them is clearly there, in an era where a lack of children wasn't cause only for emotional heartache, but potential economic ruin in the absence of our modern-day safety net for our elders in the form of Social Security and Medicare.

Yet Abraham remains faithful; he has traversed the continent for God, he has bargained with God, and he will even horrifically attempt to sacrifice his son for God.

Here in Genesis 21, Abraham strikes a treaty with the Philistines on the basis of their mutual respect that comes from the regard for immigrants that illumines throughout the Scriptures (and which we would do well to remember in the wake of this past week’s decision by the White House to rescind DACA). Abraham, having made these treaties, plants a tamarisk tree where the treaty was made—Beersheba—and he worships there, Genesis says, in the name of El Olam, the Lord.

Or, more precisely in the Hebrew, the Eternal Lord or the Eternal God. It is one of many titles, names and epithets assigned to God in the Hebrew Bible, but it is a fittingly appropriate one here.

And tamarisk trees, they live for decades. This one was clearly meant to outlive Abraham himself.

In a manner, this harkens to Martin Luther’s own (potentially apocryphal) pronouncement that if he heard that the world would end tomorrow, he would plant a tree. It is a tribute to creation’s existence long before us, and to its endurance in spite of the use and abuse we continually inflict upon it.

So I think of the Eagle Creek fire that has set our beautiful Columbia Gorge on fire, and the carelessness with which the fire was started, and the consequences it has had for our home and for the millions of our neighbors who have had to see and inhale the smoke and ash for days, and I remember that God is still bigger than our mistakes, even if we are unfeeling in committing them.

Relying on God’s own endurance, rather than our own, is one small part in first acknowledging the spiritual wounds we inflict as well as healing from the spiritual wounds inflicted upon us. As we walk through this sermon series, we will be discussing together in more specific terms what that looks like, but as is so often the case for my series, especially ones that last for several weeks or more, this first one is about getting the rest of them up off the ground and flying on their own power.

What fundamentally underlies this series—and, I think, Carol’s book—is a faith in God as eternal, and eternally enduring. God suffers with us, but God also endures with us, and even beyond us.

Put a different way: our wounds are God’s wounds, but God is also capable of healing and transcending woundedness in ways that beget resurrection, including that of Jesus Christ…and not in a manner described by the quick-fix premise of prosperity theology or commercialism, that promises a new you in 30 days, or 60 days, while working from home and buying into your friend’s multi-level marketing scheme. No, there are far too many faithful, loving people who have been beat up by life for those promises to be even remotely true. But those promises are small. God is not.

That may come as small comfort—or even, initially at least, as no comfort at all—in the face of so many wounds we see and experience in the here and now: not only those wildfires that have wreaked havoc and destruction upon our sacred earth, but also those wounds we see in our community every day: addiction, homelessness, poverty—wounds that we could do more to heal on both individual and systemic levels, and that we have not done so only adds to the pain suffered and experienced.

But if today’s science-slash-history lesson about the Sahara is any indication, God is still fully capable of putting a lush grassland where previously a desert existed. And wherever the deserts are located in your soul, God remains capable of adding life to them. I have no doubt that in the wake of the destruction of Irma and Jose that God, through us, will be able to add life where life was lost; part of the reason I know is because I am beginning to see those stories trickle out of Texas after Harvey.

Yet it still hurts immensely in the here and now. Lives and homes and livelihoods are lost while we as people steadfastly refuse to acknowledge our collective culpability in those losses, even as we demand such culpability and accountability for the Eagle Creek fire.

The fires in the Columbia Gorge this week wounded us, many of us deeply. But take a moment and see if, in those flames, you can also comprehend the sheer pain and hurt of those for whom religion has been like a wildfire—with no water with which to salve the burn.

Do that, and the trees and wildlife may not come back right away—but, like the tamarisk tree of Abraham, the hope that they represent something far bigger and far greater will remain intact.

That hope alone will not fix everything—or even necessarily anything, at least not right away.

But for now, it is a start. A good start.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

September 10, 2017

Original image credit: Shutterstock