Letting Go

There’s a meme that’s appeared in my Facebook feed a couple of times this fall – a picture of autumn leaves and the words ‘the trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.’

Creation is often our teacher, pointing us toward God and reminding us of how our lives are intertwined with others. The Psalmist proclaims, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God.’ Poet Gerard Manly Hopkins writes, ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ And Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes that the first man ‘understood that all the knowledge he needed in order to live was present in the land. His role was not control or change the world as a human, but learn from the world how to be human.’ Creation is often our teacher, revealing God and ourselves to us.

And something in me has been resistant to the lessons of autumn this year, the lessons of ‘how lovely it is to let things go,’ the lessons of surrender. Maybe it’s the ways the season reminds me of my mortality, maybe it’s dreading the darkness and cold of winter. Maybe it’s that continuing to live with so many uncertainties makes surrender, letting go, feel harder than ever and not at all lovely. I’m not even sure what it is I am resisting letting go of . . . maybe it’s my ideas of what I should be able to do, who I think I should be. Maybe it’s my hopes and fears for my kids, for our neighborhood, for our church. So many things need to be held loosely these days – big things and small things. Maybe its that in what feels like a long season of loss, it’s hard to let go.

Last week we had some time with friends up north, near Houghton Lake. The weather was cold and dreary, but we hiked anyway and on one of our hikes, our friend challenged our family to find leaves in every color of the rainbow and gather them and we’d have a rainbow contest at the next trail marker. There was some resistance to the idea, but soon we were all busily collecting leaves and creating our rainbows. And it got me thinking about Noah and the rainbow and how the sign of God’s promise was/is a sign that comes with rain and storms and it isn’t always visible. And yet there are signs of God’s faithfulness everywhere once we begin looking for them. The changing of seasons, the sunrise each morning, our daily bread.

I’ve been looking for signs of God’s faithfulness this week, trying to gather them up like we gathered our leaf rainbows. Here are a few I’ve noticed: the drop-off line for Eastminster preschool when I walk the dog in the morning, and the school buses driving through the neighborhood; kids coming in and out of church after school for Learning Cafe; elders and deacons meeting and praying in person for the needs of the church and the community; the thick frost on the grass, and the annual turning on of the boiler at church; our kids’ eager excitement about making costumes for Halloween.

My spiritual director gently reminded me this week that fall is a transition – it’s about letting go but it’s also about letting come. And maybe instead of resisting the lessons of autumn about letting go I can keep watching for signs of God’s faithfulness in this season of change.

God's Rest

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what rest means. Sunday’s sermon was all about rest—God’s rest. And the rest that God invites us to. We looked at Hebrews 4:1-11, and we talked about the many different layers of meaning to the word “rest” in this passage, but we didn’t have enough time to really do it justice. And it’s been bugging me since then—in part because even though I preached that sermon, I’m still just a bit unclear about what “rest” here really is.

We talked on Sunday about it being peace—the peace of God. The goodness of God. A sliver of the wholeness of the Garden of Eden or a foretaste of the glory of the already-but-not-yet Kingdom of God. What’s still just a little confusing for me, however, is how it relates to work. There’s still work to be done in this world. There’s still work for God that we’re called to do in this world. God’s rest is not an invitation to kick up our heels and enjoy a glass of lemonade.

I caught a podcast of The Bible Project this morning. It was a follow-up to the series they did on the Son of Man title for Jesus. But I was surprised to hear a reference in it to God’s rest in Genesis 1 and 2. And they, too, noted that rest here is not an absence of work as much as it is a transforming of our understanding of work. One of the clearest expressions of God’s rest from Genesis 1 and 2 is the Garden of Eden—and this is not God taking a break from work as much as it is God being present in and through the world. And so when God invites us into God’s rest, it is an invitation into God’s presence—just as we had in the Garden of Eden.

I then went back and listened to the Bible Project’s podcast specifically on God’s Rest. Like Hebrews 4, it rooted the Sabbath rest of the Ten Commandments in the rest of God from Genesis 1 and 2. One of the pitfalls of working too much is that we quickly begin to think that our survival depends entirely on ourselves. We forget our dependence upon God, we forget that all that we have is a gift from God, we forget that God is ultimately providing for us. And so one day a week, a Sabbath rest, we are invited to step away from our work and enter a mini Garden of Eden. We are invited to remember that our lives don’t depend upon our own work. Our lives depend upon God.

This is helpful in projecting forward as well. We’re not looking back at a Garden of Eden as much as we are looking ahead to the New Jerusalem. A world where all the brokenness is healed. Where there is no more sorrow or suffering or pain. Where everything is in right relationship with everything else. I’d like to think that I’m striving for this world. That I’m doing my best to live into that reality right now. That I’m working to heal brokenness in this world. To lift up the oppressed. To give hope to the hopeless. But this is hard work. And it can be tiring. And it’s easy to think that we’re not making any difference. And, of course, it feels like I’m never doing enough.

But here, in part, is where God invites us into God’s rest. Not to stop working per se. But to do the work in a new freedom. To enter into the presence of God. To see God already at work in and through the world. To remember that even as God invites us to participate in this important work, its success does not depend upon us. It is God’s work. And God will get it done. 

For All the Saints

On Sunday morning on the way to church I mentioned to the kids that part of the passage for the sermon was about ancestors and reminded them of a couple of stories of me and their great-grandparents and also told them again how much I think their great-grandparents would have enjoyed them. We were in the car because it had started to rain as we were leaving the house, and as we crossed Kalamazoo Ave the rain came down even harder, and one of them said, ‘You know our church doesn’t really have a good place to get out and go in that’s protected from the rain.’

And I said, ‘Oh yes we do! One of your ancestors at church, Ken Zaagman, thought of that when the church was adding the education wing, and insisted that we have a place for folks to get out that would be covered when it was raining – that’s why there’s that covering going over the driveway on the side of church.’ So we pulled up under it, I let the kids out, and then pulled around and rushed inside to open the doors for them. It might be the first time we’ve ever used that covering in the rain....

During the service and into this week, our Boston Square ancestors have continued to be on my mind. I’ve been thinking of some of the stuff in the building – the fan in the balcony that was also used in the church when it met in a storefront. The certificate of appreciation that’s framed and hanging in the council room from 1946 expressing gratitude to Boston Square Church from the Diaconate of the Gereformeerde Kerk of St Annaparochie in the Netherlands for sending needed clothing after World War II ended.

I’ve been remembering Tom Draisma setting up my desk and bookshelves in my office after he and Marilyn painted it yellow for me, fifteen years ago when I began working at Boston Square. Ray Van Sledright tending the beans and tomato plants along the fence in the parking lot. Nell Holwerda Bouwma, who fainted in church 2 different times, both when Jay was preaching on the Song of Mary, and who wrote on her ballot when the congregation was voting on whether or not to close or make significant changes, ‘Don’t close my church!’ And how a few months later it was a generous bequest from her estate that gave Boston Square the money needed to continue. So many people and so many stories....

As we celebrated communion together on Sunday morning, singing ‘Oh give thanks to the Lord, for his love endures forever,’ with folks scattered around the sanctuary and invisible on zoom, I found myself wondering what Boston Square’s ancestors from the 40’s and 50’s and 60’s and even the 90’s might think of our congregation now. I imagined them joining us in worship – it was one of those moments when the veil between now and eternity felt very thin. And I imagined them being delighted by who we are now and how the Spirit is still at work among us today.

I recently re-read the book Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson, who writes ‘We are all the dream come true of the people who came before us.’ Maybe this is some of what the author of Hebrews had in mind, when later in the book, he or she writes about us being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, cheering us on. As we said in our words of sending on Sunday: “For all in whom Christ lived before us, thanks be to God. And, “For all in whom Christ lives beside us, thanks be to God.”