Letters from the Soul: This Month's Newsletter Column

“Lost in the Wilderness”

Dear Church,

The liturgical season of Lent—a time meant to represent the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness at the beginning of His ministry—begins with Ash Wednesday on February 13 and concludes on Good Friday (the day of the crucifixion), which this year falls on March 29.  Traditionally, we are taught that we are supposed to give something up during Lent as a symbol of our togetherness with Jesus as he fasted in the wilderness.  Because Jesus also faced the temptations of Satan while in the wilderness, tradition dictates that we, too, should give up something that tempts us. 

In past Lenten seasons, I have given up Facebook, video games, beer, and liquor entirely, among other things.  But I haven’t yet settled on something to give up for Lent in 2013 (fortunately, I still have a couple of weeks to decide!).

However, we aren’t constrained simply to giving something up for Lent—we can also take something up!  Just as Jesus urges us to take up our own personal crosses, we can take up new spiritual practices during Lent.  For instance, one of the things I always tried doing while in seminary was reading verse-by-verse through a book of the Bible that I otherwise wouldn’t have much occasion to read (like, say, one of the minor prophets).

All of this is to say that we truly are not constrained in ways to seek and worship God.  In planning out your Lenten journey, feel free to think outside the proverbial box, even if doing so means you are blazing new trails and walking new paths.

After all, part of being in the wilderness means risking getting lost.  Feel free enough and brave enough to do so, with the knowledge that God will still always find you in the end!

Yours in Christ,

Pastor Eric

The Janus Dilemma

January is named after the Roman doorkeeper deity Janus, who, it is said, had two faces--one facing forward towards the future, and another facing backward to the past.

The first time I saw a painting of my birth month's namesake as a kid, I may have freaked out a little bit.   It's a bit unusual.

And lying in Janus' appearance is one of the many reasons Christians either describe themselves or are often fine with being described as "single-minded."  Single-mindedness, as opposed to double-mindedness (which we have since associated with wrongness or evil--see also the Batman villain Harvey Dent/Two-Face from The Dark Knight), is a divine attribute of the one true God who is of a singular, divine mind and substance, whereas we have pagan deities with multiple faces and heads.

(We'll ignore for a moment that the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel depicts the cherubim angels as having four faces...clearly, we've gone a bit overboard in our colloquialisms that refer to wrongness.)

Nevertheless, a pagan deity like Janus is, and should be, a sympathetic figure to mainline Christians like myself today.  Not because we should worship such an idol--we shouldn't--but because his situation of standing betwixt past and future in the mythical doorway of the present is one that we find ourselves in as the Christian Church.

If it's a drum whose cadence I regularly beat, it's for a reason...I remain stuck in the middle of a denomination that looks like it is in its twilight but which expects pastors like me to lead a renaissance of Christian spirituality.  I attend clergy meetings in which I am the youngest pastor in the room by 20 years, and I have to tread the line of respecting the work of my more senior colleagues while also making clear that I am making my own path.  I have to explain the ways and questions of my generation to those foreign to my generation without turning myself into a token of my generation.

I'm not saying any of this is a bad thing--I'm saying it is simply an unwritten part of my job description, one that I found myself ill-prepared for and have had to teach myself on the job as I went.

Where it does overlap with my job description, as it were, is bitingly but succinctly encapsulated by point #8 in this article by fellow mainline pastor Rev. Gary Brinn.  He writes:

When you insist on “the way we do things in this church,” I'm wondering when you stopped worshiping a living God and started worshiping a building and its resident bureaucracy. Give me half a chance, and I'll help you drop the average age of worshipers and give this church a future. Many thousands of churches close every year. This doesn't have to be one of them. But it's your choice. When you are ready to look forward instead of backward, I'll be there to lead the way. That is, after all, what you keep telling me I'm supposed to do.

In a paragraph, this is the challenge and the dilemma that not just Gary, not just me, but all of us, have to rise to meet.  It kills me inside that there are Disciples churches that have basically decided to die the way they have always lived and to sign their own death warrants and die a slow, painful, death rather than even take a shot at revitalization.  Worship of the past is, in its own way, a form of idolatry.

This should not be confused with respecting the past, which a young whippersnapper like me must always be conscientious to do.  But as a church, with so many of our members firmly in the remembering the glory days of the past, we must also take another face to look towards the unknown future, building upon the glories of our past in the hope and prayer of making something even better than what we ourselves had.

Yours in Christ,

Eric

This Week's Sermon: "A Time to Tear, A Time to Sew"

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens: 2 a time for giving birth and a time for dying, a time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted, 3 a time for killing and a time for healing, a time for tearing down and a time for building up, 4 a time for crying and a time for laughing, a time for mourning and a time for dancing, 5 a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, a time for embracing and a time for avoiding embraces, 6 a time for searching and a time for losing, a time for keeping and a time for throwing away, 7 a time for tearing and a time for repairing, a time for keeping silent and a time for speaking, 8 a time for loving and a time for hating, a time for war and a time for peace. (CEB)

“A Time to Tear, A Time to Sew,” Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

A Time to Be Church: Ecclesiastes and Envisioning Our Promising Future, Week Three

The way the news article put it, they thought it would be the worst place to have a church.  People wondered if this particular parish in Manhattan’s Times Square could even survive its surroundings. 

Because this was not the Times Square of today, but of 35 years ago, and then, as NBC bluntly put it, “Times Square was ripe with drugs, pornography, and prostitution.”

But the priest who took over Saint Malachy’s in 1976, rather than proposing to shutter its doors, reached out to the community, to the business owners, to the theaters, and yes, to the owners of the pornography stores.

And the church lives to this day.  Not because, I truly feel, of any miraculous act of God, but because a place with drugs and sex workers…well, isn’t that the best place to put a church?  If we were to actually follow Jesus’ model and completely go for broke, wouldn’t the church plant its parishes where they are needed most, rather than wherever the money happens to be?

It is a metamorphosis that speaks to our own story as a church as well.

This is the final installment of a relatively brief sermon series for us to begin 2013.  This series is only three weeks long, which I think is about as short as a sermon series can be and still be called a series—otherwise, it would just be a two-volume set, right?  But we’re going to give the trilogy look a try for the rest of January as we press forward with a new year of being church together.  And the purpose of this series is to take a very famous and well-loved poem—the “To everything there is a season” stanza in the third chapter of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes—and in it see where we are headed as a church.  A lot has changed in this past year and a half since I had the great blessing of being called by you to be your pastor, and so just like when I first arrived here by offering the “Ashes to Sunlight” sermon series, I want to touch base with all of you once more as we look at what possibilities there are for us as a church in the increasingly rapidly changing cultural and religious landscape that is the Pacific Northwest.  The challenge is, just as the author of Ecclesiastes often looks back, we must, by nature of where we are, look forwards!

I have to admit that I was surprised when I moved here at a number of the concerns facing the Longview-Kelso area.  I arrived right in the midst of a protracted labor dispute between the ports and the longshoremens’ union.  I would see meth cooks riding around on bicycles with opaque water bottles that housed their ingredients, as the friction and motion from the bike mixed them together.  And I have seen what happens when a high birth rate combines with high unemployment.  The number of impoverished children we have in our community is obscene.

I don’t say all of this to knock on Longview—after all, it has become my home as well, and I love it here.  I say all of this because denial is much more than simply a river in Egypt, and our struggles as a parish do, I think, mirror the struggles of our hometown as a community.  In both cases, we worry that our best days are behind us—those of you who have been here long enough remember this church’s heyday in the days of Jim Whitaker, but you also remember the days before the mills began huge amounts of layoffs.

And so we hurt, just like the town around us.

But you’ve got to be kidding if you don’t think this wasn’t also the case for Jesus, or even for Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes.  Upon Solomon’s death, Israel immediately began a decline in the starkest possible sense—there was a revolt, and Israel was divided into two between Solomon’s son Rehoboam and the chief overseer of the crown’s forced laborers (its slaves, basically), Jeroboam.  A prophet even took a piece of fabric meant to represent Israel and tears it up into twelve pieces to represent the twelve tribes, and he hands ten of those swatches over to Jeroboam.

No wonder, then, that Solomon, in all of his wisdom and foresight, would want to include a line about there being a time to tear and a time to sew in his poem here.  That time to tear was almost upon his own kingdom!  And, in many ways in Israel and the Middle East today, we’re still working on the sewing together part.

But here’s the insult to injury, the final kick in the ribs—the reason people gave Rehoboam for their revolt was because he had promised to redouble the “yoke of Solomon” in the form of heavy taxes and heavy punishments.  But the man leading the revolt against this “yoke” was the man who had helped implement it as Solomon’s chief slave driver—Jeroboam!  It would be like a politician, after winning their election by savagely eviscerating every possible thing about their opponent’s private life, suddenly pushing for cleaner campaigning rules!

It isn’t a radical metamorphosis.  It is a tearing up of a kingdom between two villains—there are no good guys in this story.  And so we might forgive Solomon’s own jadedness thoroughout Ecclesiastes—if these are the people surrounded himself with, I might well become a cynic, too.

But as I’ve returned to each time in the past two weeks, this poem also proves that such cynicism does not—and cannot—define Solomon.

There is a time for every work under heaven, he writes—not just the stuff he likes to do, not just the stuff he knows will happen, but for everything, there is a time.

Including a time to change.  In life, in the world, in the church…there is a time to close your eyes, gather your courage, and take that leap of faith into something brand new, that leap of faith that mandates that your feet leave the ground.

I’m a Kansas City Royals fan, born and raised.  I’m very patriotic about my hometown in that way.  And to be  completely honest, I think our current general manager is terrible at his job.  I’m talking as bad as Bill Bavasi, all you Mariner’s fans. 

But he did say something about a trade gone awry that actually has stuck with me for a number of years.  He said, “If we aren’t making any mistakes, then we probably aren’t trying very hard.”

In my time here thus far as your pastor, we have tried a few things together that haven’t quite worked out, like the Sunday evening ACTS prayer service and the plan to supplement the band with a choir of fire-breathing platypuses.

And that’s part and parcel of being the church together—sometimes, the spaghetti won’t stick to the wall.  Which means that there is a time tear those things down and to build something new back up.

After all, 35 years ago, people said a church couldn’t survive in the Times Square center of Manhattan.  And guess what?  People say the same thing about a church in the center of a town—that’s us!  People say that all the growth happens in the suburbs and the exurbs as metropolitan areas geographically expand into more and more land.  People say that churches in the center of towns are finished, because the model of folks coming into town for church no longer applies.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Trust me when I say that if we offer a church life that actually speaks to people where they’re at, rather than where we think they should be, and if we create the kind of atmosphere where people feel safe enough not only to entertain their faith but their deepest doubts and fears about it and be guided rather than scolded, then we’re doing something right.

There is no one-size-fits-all vision for church growth.  But here, we’ve taken our own steps towards growth.  And those steps haven’t involved installing a light show, or putting Lori on a drum kit with a kick drum, high hat, and snares, and we haven’t yet installed a mechanical platform that allows me to ascend into the sanctuary on a cloud of dry ice like in Iron Chef.  Believe it or not, there are other ways of evangelizing and growing that don’t involve all the bells and whistles.

Because, in the end, it’s the message that matters most.  It’s why Jesus could get away with coming to Earth when He did, far from the era of instant news and smartphone technology and social media.  In the end, no matter how you package it, the Gospel is the Gospel.

In other words, while it matters how you package it, it matters far more how you live it.

And that, too, is something that Solomon allows us time for.  For there is a time to build up, there is a time to love, there is a time for peace, for seeking, for keeping, for embracing, and healing, and speaking out.

And I know that there is a time to be the church.  Because all of those things are us being the church.

That’s our time.  That’s our calling.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson

Longview, Washington

January 27, 2013

The Death Note

I turn 27 today.  At 4:03 pm Central Standard Time in 1986, I was born via cesarean section after refusing to cooperate and come out headfirst like a normal kid.

Late last night, close to the stroke of midnight central time when it would become my birthday where I was born (as opposed to where I live now, on the West Coast), I was driving home from a hospice center where the father of a congregant passed away after a long, losing battle with cancer.

So just as I'm celebrating my life today, members of my church family are mourning the loss of another life.  And I mourn as well.

Perhaps on another day in another year, it might cause me to simply listen to The Lion King's "Circle of Life" on repeat.  But not today.

I was asked by the hospice nurse to fill out a spiritual care form to document my ministry with the family over the past few days.  At the bottom of the page was a box to check whether the patient had passed away.

I hesitated for a second before marking off that box.

In that moment's hesitation, a flood of memories came back of my stint as a chaplaincy intern in California Pacific Medical Center's Clinical Pastoral Education program in San Francisco.

There, I had to document in a patient's chart log any pastoral care I gave--including at times of death.

You haven't lived until you have tried to sum up another person's dying in a paragraph of clinically dry language.

The writing of those death notes was one of the emptiest experiences I have ever had in ministry.  Sitting down amid the hustle and bustle of a nurse's station, I'd have to tune out everything else around me to try to summon the will to describe my work at another person's death.

And after the anger I've struggled with lately over things far outside my control (see also: my immediate previous entry), I have to admit that those memories flooding back to me acted as a pretty strong and necessary hip check.

Dying is part of the involuntary bargain we made in being born, the involuntary bargain that gives us the greatest possible gift with the greatest possible cost of eventually losing it.

Here's to hoping and praying and knowing, on a day when I am looking back on my own life, that there is still more life that awaits us all on the other side.

Yours in Christ,
Eric

A Few Words on What Constitutes a Christian

I love the church.  And I love where I get to build the church.  I lived in the Pacific Northwest (Portland) for college, and the region was like a playground for me.  After completing seminary, I was more than happy to return, be located close to my grandfather, and enjoy the hiking, beaches, and sheer green that my neck of the woods has to offer its ridiculously lucky inhabitants.

And Portland friends, forgive me...but I even like Seattle.  It has a nice theater scene, the freakin' Boeing museum, and all the coffee you could want (actually, we have that, too).

But it also has some stuff that, if I'm completely honest with you, I'm a little bitter exists and thrives here.

So, in the interest of full disclosure: I don't care much for Mark Driscoll's ministry at his famous Mars Hill megachurch.

I have good friends and colleagues who do.  But I don't.

By the account of former Mars Hill elders, he comes across as terribly arrogant.

By the account of former Mars Hill members, he comes across as quite unforgiving.

And by his own words, he comes across as painfully sexist (in fairness, he later apologized for this one, but with a "I'm sorry if anyone was hurt"-esque non-apology).

But he managed to put the cherry on top of this totally terrible-tasting trifecta of a sundae by yesterday tweeting the following, which has now been retweeted at least a few thousand times:

"Praying for our president, who today will place his hands on a Bible he does not believe to take an oath to a God he likely does not know."

And I'm not proud of this, but it's true: that statement alone--and everything that it implies--was enough to send me oozing into a fury on what was otherwise a day of celebration and historic significance.

Because no matter how I look at Driscoll's tweet, I can only interpret it one of two ways: either he's parroting the "Obama-is-a-Muslim" fantasy of the lunatic fringe right (in which case we can add "racist" to the above list of arrogant, unforgiving, and sexist), or he's saying that mainline Christians aren't real Christians.

I'll dispense with the former by simply saying I do not think Mark Driscoll is a racist.  And in any case, there's a pretty important commandment in Scripture about bearing false witness to your neighbors that I try to follow.  So I don't think that's it.

But as to the latter...as a mainline Christian who is pretty fluent in evangelical jargon and is comfortable in both mainline and evangelical circles, can I just say, GROW UP, WOULD YOU PLEASE?

I won't pretend to know why Mark said what he said in that tweet.  For all I know, he was trying to be provocative (it certainly wouldn't be the first time), and I've risen to take the bait.

But I have to say...it sickens me that conservative evangelical Christians deign to determine for themselves who constitutes a Christian and who does not.  To me, that is a form of playing God, with all of the immaturity (both emotional and spiritual) that entails.

It sickens me that a pastor with the pulpit Mark does is using it to repeat an insidious and disproven lie--that our President is not a Christian (not that it would matter if he were something else--I vote for a politician's policies, not their religious affiliation).

And it sickens me personally because it is an affront to my faith and MY relationship with Jesus Christ that pastors like Mark claim to so highly value.  I've never been born-again, or at least I don't identify as born-again.  I was raised from birth in the church.  I've never recited the Sinner's Prayer, in which I ask Jesus to be my Lord and Savior.

I simply said, upon my baptism at age 10, that He already WAS my Lord and Savior.  Becuase He is.  Not because I made it so.

I believe President Obama is a Christian until and unless he says or does otherwise.  He deserves the benefit of the doubt from me on this particular pecadillo.

But know this: the people who say that he isn't a Christian aren't just throwing stones at the President, they are throwing stones at millions of their brothers and sisters in Christ who have a different faith journey than they do.  They are insulting a faith journey that can, and should, result in a growing of faith, the performing of mission and social justice, and the attainment of salvation.

And no matter which way you cut it, impugning that is just plain sinful.

Yours in Christ,

Eric

This Week's Sermon: "A Time to Seek, a Time to Lose"

Ecclesiastes 3:1-6

There’s a season for everything and a time for every matter under the heavens: 2 a time for giving birth and a time for dying, a time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted, 3 a time for killing and a time for healing, a time for tearing down and a time for building up, 4 a time for crying and a time for laughing, a time for mourning and a time for dancing, 5 a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, a time for embracing and a time for avoiding embraces, 6 a time for searching and a time for losing, a time for keeping and a time for throwing away (CEB)

“A Time to Be Church: Ecclesiastes and Envisioning a Promising Future,” Week Two

The gardens encompass an entire city block, standing as a tiny oasis of green in the urban wilderness at the heart of downtown San Francisco.  Locals and tourists alike will come from around the Bay Area to visit the museums and restaurants that surround it, to see a free outdoor concert played, or to simply lay down on the grass on one of those rare, precious days that San Francisco sees a bit of sunlight.

Others, though, will come for a very specific reason: the city’s memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. is there, and it stands as a two-story waterfall, as 120,000 gallons of water circulate through over and over, from the glass-like top to the ground where you can actually walk behind the waterfall to see, etched in stone, two of Martin Luther King’s greatest quotes, including this from his famous “I Have a Dream” sermon of the book of the prophet Isaiah at our nation’s capital:

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until 'justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. 

You can reach out and touch the words themselves, immortalized in the bedrock of the waterfall, and, honestly, it is many ways like walking into here every Sunday: you can literally walk in, reach out, and touch history itself.  What a wonderful gift that is.

This is a new, but relatively brief, sermon series for us to begin 2013.  This series is only three weeks long, which I think is about as short as a sermon series can be and still be called a series—otherwise, it would just be a two-volume set, right?  But we’re going to give the trilogy look a try for the rest of January as we press forward with a new year of being church together.  And the purpose of this series is to take a very famous and well-loved poem—the “To everything there is a season” stanza in the third chapter of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes—and in it see where we are headed as a church.  A lot has changed in this past year and a half since I had the great blessing of being called by you to be your pastor, and so just like when I first arrived here by offering the “Ashes to Sunlight” sermon series, I want to touch base with all of you once more as we look at what possibilities there are for us as a church in the increasingly rapidly changing cultural and religious landscape that is the Pacific Northwest.  The challenge is, just as the author of Ecclesiastes often looks back, we must, by nature of where we are, look forwards!

In case you weren’t here last week (Go Seahawks?!), here is my basic gist of Ecclesiastes:

The writer of Ecclesiastes—traditionally believed to be King Solomon, the son of David—would definitely have been seen as (spiritually starving) today.  He is the author of immortal lines like, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!” “time and chance happens to us all,” and, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” 

If books in the Bible were Winnie the Pooh characters, Ecclesiastes would be Eeyore.  If books in the Bible were Dr. Seuss characters, Ecclesiastes would be the Grinch.  If books in the Bible were Sesame Street characters…well, you get the idea.

And as much as we might want to write of Solomon today as a Debbie downer, he is becoming increasingly a part of our target audience for today.  Because he’s also someone who, I think, wants to be optimistic, even if he cannot manage it all of the time.

Yet, being optimistic almost gets confused with naivete today.  It is difficult for us to be optimistic, at least as difficult as it was for Solomon, and he had a freaking palace!

And so, I imagine, we may spend a moment or two this holiday weekend to reflect upon the legacy of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and marvel at how far we have come, as a people and as a nation.  We will feel heartened as a result, and we will continue to go about the hustle and bustle of our day-to-day lives.

But there’s something missing in that ritual.  Yes, we do right to seek out the legacy of a pastor and leader such as Dr. King.  But if all we do is reflect on it and sit on it, we are doing nobody and nothing any favors, the least of which is that legacy of Dr. King’s.

After all, Dr. King proposed to move heaven and earth precisely because he could not be satisfied with the status quo.  He sought not only to lose the shackles of a world segregated, he sought to seek a world of equality and justice.  I cannot imagine that he would have been content with playing it safe, with coloring within the lines, and with never making waves.

That’s where we find ourselves as a church—not just us, but the entire church.  We are cautious, afraid of losing what little we still cling to.  At a regional clergy meeting I attended this week, the topic of the meeting was how the church can minister to the millennials—essentially, my generation.  And wouldn’t you know it, with me there, they had a real, live millennial to talk to!

But the worst part of the meeting was not having to rep an entire generation, but hearing a colleague talk about all the churches they know who refuse to change anything about how they do things, even though they know that in doing so, they are signing their own death warrant as a congregation.  They would rather die in the familiarity of their cocoon than attempt resurrection.

That’s not what the church is about.  It’s not what Dr. King was about.  And most importantly, it’s not what Jesus was about.

Jesus’ ministry only lasted either one or three years, depending on which Biblical scholar you ask.  Even for the divine Son of God, there’s only so much you can do in that time…after all, as Solomon himself says, time happens to us all, and it definitely happened to Jesus—he went from being a newborn baby to a child teaching in the temple to a fully grown adult.  But he so changed the world that I have to think that he absolutely proved true the notion that one year of incredible beats however many years of mediocre.

In order to find what we truly seek, we have to be willing to lose so, so much to begin with.

That’s what faith is, in a nutshell.  It isn’t a zero-cost proposition.  Being a Christian entails a certain amount of risk—not in the afterlife, but in this life…it’s the risk that you might make your heart and soul vulnerable to a community that pledges its love and support to you.  It’s the risk that you might actually care about other people in ways you never could before.  And it’s the risk you take that any of that might one day cause you to rethink everything about the world.

There’s a reason why it’s called a leap of faith.  You have to leave the ground at some point.

And this is something I know this church has had to do in a big way simply by calling me here.  Doing so was your way of saying, “God is not finished with us yet,” and I absolutely believe this has been borne out so far in our year and a half together.  We have engaged the community in new ways of doing mission, of feeding schoolchildren and planting gardens; we have begun new studies of Scripture and new ministries of music.  We do so much precisely because we have had to decide, as a community, to take the risk that a few years of awesome outweigh many more years of dreariness, and I absolutely expect us to continue to do so much, and to do even more.

This is, I think, the message that the King Solomons of today, those who are starved spiritually, could stand to hear from the church.  Not the judgment, not the anger, but the inane notion that we are here because we aren’t satisfied with keeping the world as it is.  We want to make it better.

And sometimes making the world better means making ourselves better.  Making the church better.  Making the church into something that speaks to people and continues to change lives.

This time a year ago, I wrote on my blog about trying to preach in memory of Dr. King for the first time in my ministry.  And in doing so, I realized a deep fear that I had to confront about myself as a pastor and a preacher—that what I want from myself and from fellow clergy is whatever it was that Dr. King took with him when he was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee.  Many of us try, in our own ways and styles, to be as inspiring and impactful as him, but we are mere shells compared to him.  Competent fakes, but fakes nonetheless.

The church, though, does not have to be that way.  And if it sounds like I am lowering expectations for myself but not for you, that is not at all the case.  The church is an amazing thing, an institution that has illuminated the world for nearly two thousand years.  And it has managed that incredible feat precisely because it lives out, day and day again, the maxim we focus on today from Solomon’s poem: there is a time to seek, and there is a time to lose.

By engaging in the seeking, we risk the losing.

It can be no other way.  Because if it were, our faith costs nothing.  Our faith means nothing.

But as we know…as we must know, it means everything.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington

January 20, 2013

Struggling With Forgiving

Every July, I used to get up ridiculously early to watch the Tour de France be broadcast live on OLN (later the Versus network).  The rents--especially my dad--teased me for it, saying, "All they do is pedal!" and after commercial breaks, "Wow, they're still pedaling!"

But I loved it.  I enjoyed learning the strategy of something that is, on the surface, solo (a bike ride) be treated as a team sport.  Being able to watch it live meant an awful lot to me.

So...it's personal.

But I also lost both of my grandmothers within a year of each other to cancer.

It's personal.

My mother had a double mastectomy in 2006 to pre-emptively ward off the very beginnings of breast cancer.

It's personal.

I feel like my faith and trust were used by someone who, while doing fantastic work for cancer victims worldwide, also perpetrated one of the most systematic frauds known to sports.  And in doing so, my faith in other people...I have to admit, it has taken a hit.

And tonight, the come-clean interview (I'm not sure it qualifies as a mea culpa just yet) of Lance Armstrong by Oprah Winfrey sees the light of day.

It comes at a time when I am not exactly at my most forgiving.

I get the forgiveness comes with the job description of being a Christian, and of being a pastor: "How many times must I forgive my neighbor?  As many as seven times?"  "No, but seventy times seven," said Christ.

But I also have no capacity to forgive for wrongs done to more than just me--and by this point, Lance Armstrong's bullying of his detractors is extremely well-documented.

But it isn't just that.

It's everyone who has been affected by cancer--who has suffered it themselves, or suffered alongside a loved one with cancer.

I cannot forgive things done to them.

I think we tend to see forgiveness as being facilitated by remorse or contrition--someone says they are sorry and means it, and the other person accepts the apology and forgives them.

I will admit that my own quest to forgive a cheat and fraud who inspired the world would probably be helped if he does, in fact, express remorse in his interview tonight.  To be honest, I do not have faith that he will--all of this smacks of someone who is sorry not for cheating, but for getting caught cheating.  Still, I hope to be proven wrong.

But in the end, none of that is necessary.

Nor should it be necessary.

Because it would mean I am still defining myself and my actions by someone else and their actions.

Whether I forgive wrongs done to me is a decision in my keeping alone.

And that is as it should be.

And so I struggle with forgiving.

How very Christian--and very un-Christlike--of me.  Broken, finite, human, Christian me.

Yours in Christ,
Eric