Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

November 3, 2019

Luke 6: 20 – 31

Then he looked up at his disciples and said:

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

“But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

“Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Message

It has been years that I have been keeping my phone by my bed at night, just in case someone dies.  This might be a pastor problem, but I didn’t quite realize it until earlier this week.  I’d left my phone on a charger in a different part of the house and I woke up worried, checking the screen to see if there was a message I had missed.  And although it might be, in part, part of my job description, I think I might not be alone in this for I know there are those who, for a night or for a season, keep the phone next to the bed because the kids are staying out late tonight, because someone promised to call you if there was anything you needed to know, because you were waiting for news of a loved one and as you are sent home to sleep you know that the only news they might wake you up for isn’t good.  I realized I have kept this phone next to my bed as a ritual, as an altar to my fears of what might be.  I can say at the best that it’s a recognition of mortality, that none of us knows what the next day will hold and we promise to be present whatever may come.  The other side is a monument to my fears: of illness or injury or death, of the things that can rouse one from your sleep with a startle and a gasp at an unknown number or just one more telemarketer who doesn’t understand the Pacific Time Zone.

A place to hold our fears, I think, is common as is a place to hold our grief.  It could be that you have a box in some closet, or maybe the attic or under the bed that holds within it a grief that feels too close to name: the gifts, the clothes, the papers that felt hard to go through and so you found a place that is safe where they can stay in the hopes that your grief maybe can stay there, too.

I’ve been listening to a podcast of two folks that listen to self-help books and then live by them for two weeks with comical results.  They did this one that was on death, on dying well, and they said there were some listeners to their podcasts who wrote in to say that even seeing the word “dying” on their feed made them too anxious.  I understand.  If you start thinking about death you confront a whole gamut of things that make us uncomfortable.  We think about our own mortality, the fact that each of us will, in fact, die.  Death is related to the things we may fear most, of pain, of illness, impairment, dependency.  There are plenty of things to fear in this life, like poverty and illne

Pastor Patty Ebner

October 27, 2019

Acts 9: 1-6

The Conversion of Saul

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’

Romans 1:8-12

Prayer of Thanksgiving

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed throughout the world. For God, whom I serve with my spirit by announcing the gospel of his Son, is my witness that without ceasing I remember you always in my prayers, asking that by God’s will I may somehow at last succeed in coming to you. For I am longing to see you so that I may share with you some spiritual gift to strengthen you— or rather so that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.

Message

You may be surprised to see me at the pulpit again after Lisa’s return.  But it is always my pleasure to talk with you.

Before I start on my message, I want to say that a call to ministry is a special thing but it is not limited to those of us wearing robes and stoles and headsets today.  So I want just to put that myth to sleep before I ever get started; otherwise, Lisa and I would just go back into our offices and we would talk about our calls to ministry.  But there is a reason I am standing in front of you, talking about Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus and how it relates to us so many years later.  You hear me talk about that often when I preach because one of the things that impresses me the most about the Christian tradition is how long it has lasted, that it has stood the test of time through many different movements, and those movements happening at the very same time.  And what we are called to, as a progressive Christian congregation, is to continue to find ways to make the text relatable to us, to greet a message that resonates with us and most importantly to hear a message to which we can respond to make a difference in today’s world.

I don’t remember when I began using the word “call.”  I clearly remember my own call to ministry as a vocation and I clearly remember the time when I went to Pacific School of Religion to “Come and See Weekend” and I began to hear the stories of other peoples’ call to ministry.  It was a moment of great unity for me, to be in the presence of other people who had shared the same experience I had shared and that I was currently holding.

When I entered seminary as an MDiv student, two years after that weekend, I noticed that people would often begin their sentences with, “Oh, well, I feel called to do ‘X, Y and Z,’” and it caused me a little bit of pause because I thought, “You’re just kind of using it like, “I’ve decided to have a Big Mac for lunch.”  So it raises the question of, “What is the difference between hearing a call, discerning a call or just choosing something you want to do;” and there is a difference.

Paul’s road trip to Damascus today is very enlightening in many ways and it is challenging in some ways.  So the first thing that causes us pause when we read today’s story is this flashing light that came on to Paul as he travelled.  The second thing that causes us pause is that he heard

Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

October 13, 2019

Exodus 3: 1 – 14a

             Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

             Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

Message

The only time I ever saw a bush on fire I didn’t believe it until the fire truck arrived.  I was in downtown Kirkland, waiting for the light to turn, when I saw what seemed to be smoke, up by the corner of the Kirkland Library.  What threw me off was that it seemed like nobody else appeared to be noticing.  Around me, there were people just nonchalantly walking along, crossing the street, driving their cars, and I was there going, “I could swear that looks like a cloud of smoke billowing from a bush over there.”  But it was just far enough away that I thought, “I must be seeing things; it must be an unusually hazy day or something.”  Because surely, if that bush was on fire, someone would be doing something, right?  And as soon as I had dismissed the thought, and I was going about my business, that was when I heard the sirens coming down the street; the fire engine literally parked in front of the bush, ready to extinguish the spark that had somehow met dry kindling there, even as I had convinced myself it was not smoking just a moment before.  Every pastor dreams of a literal burning bush, and I missed it because I kept waiting for someone else to notice it first.

The scripture says that Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, that he had led his flock beyond the wilderness and there the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a thorn bush.  He looked and the bush was blazing and yet it was not consumed.  And Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why this bush is not burnt up.”

We are talking about call this month and today we are looking at Moses

Pastor Lisa Horst Clark

October 6, 2019

Genesis 17:1-10, 15-17

The Sign of the Covenant

When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be blameless. And I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous.’ Then Abram fell on his face; and God said to him, ‘As for me, this is my covenant with you: You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God.’

God said to Abraham, ‘As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised.

God said to Abraham, ‘As for Sarai your wife, you shall not call her Sarai, but Sarah shall be her name. I will bless her, and moreover I will give you a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall give rise to nations; kings of peoples shall come from her.’ Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed, and said to himself, ‘Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? Can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?’

Message

Barbara Brown Taylor tries to name all the ways she has known God and found spiritual practices, especially outside of the church, and she names that “most of my visions of the divine happened while I was busy doing something else.  They happened to me the same way a thunder storm happens to me or a bad cold or the sudden awareness that I am desperately in love.  I play no apparent part in their genesis; the only part to decide is how I will respond.  We are going to have so many calls through this month it will be glorious, since there is plenty I can do, namely to make them go away.  I can (1) figure I have had too much caffeine again, (2) I can remind myself that visions aren’t true the same way that taxes are true or the evening news, (3) I can return my attention to everything I need to get done that day.  These are only a few of the things I can do to talk myself out of living in the house of God.  Or I can set a little altar in the world or in my heart; I can flag one more gate to heaven, one more patch of ordinary earth where the divine traffic is heavy, when I notice it and even when I do not.”

We are going to be talking about call this month and the ways we hear the call of God to participate in the work of the world of creating the Kingdom of Heaven and today we are starting not with the “what” we are supposed to do but the “who.”  Not what we are called to put our efforts behind but who is the one who is calling: a call to relationship, a call to faith.  Some folks in the scripture, prophets and saintly folks, have one big vision of God: they hear a voice, they make their objections on the spot until we finally end with a “yes” and they set about the big epic work of God in certainty and faith.

Abraham’s story is a little different.  Abraham, in this story it says that scripture, it took four times of God coming, four sets of promises, proclamations of the covenant God was making with Abraham and Sarah before Isaa