Worship Schedule:
10:00am in the Sanctuary and on YouTube
Due to the pandemic the need for food is increasing daily. In addition, the annual Letter Carriers Food Drive (Stamp Out Hunger) which normally produces more than 50,000 lbs. of donated food has been canceled which makes the need even greater.
AFAC needs canned vegetables, cereal (low sugar), canned tuna, canned tomato products (stewed, diced, paste), and peanut butter (in plastic jars).
Contributions can be dropped off in the Narthex.
Since we cannot assemble weekly in person for a full range of experiences of Christian community, I am endeavoring in the first weeks of my pastorate at Resurrection Church to offer weekly spiritual reflections in addition to my Sunday sermon videos. I see these mid-week written reflections as an exercise of my teaching ministry as a pastor, especially during this time of global pandemic and necessary sheltering at home and social distancing. Resurrection Church has a rich tradition of substantive adult Christian Education. These weekly reflections seek to fill, in some measure, the void created by the absence of our Sunday morning adult educational experiences. I long for the return of those Sunday morning offerings in person which feature the substantial gifts of our own members, but for now, I give you what I can in these weekly reflections. These messages also serve to nurture a sense of our Christian community during this time when we are apart.
May God in Christ bless your engagement with these pastoral offerings in the power of the Holy Spirit for your ongoing Christian formation for your journey of faith for such a time as this.
Dear Friends in Christ:
We’ve been undertaking worship at home for some eight months now. Given the trajectory of the pandemic in what is clear is a nationwide intensified outbreak, we are likely to be worshiping at home for some time to come, even as we are also now holding brief services outdoors every two weeks in conjunction with the collection of food for the AFAC food pantry.
Worship at home is for many of us a solitary venture, even if we share common resources. I engage the materials by myself on Sunday mornings just before turning my attention to creating a first draft of my sermon for the next Sunday. I preach by myself in the pastor’s office in the church focused on the tiny blue-gray dot that is the camera lens on my laptop computer.
You may have your own solitary practices at home, or do home worship with your spouse or your family as a “pod” safely protected, but disconnected from others in our congregation. Even if your family, as a small gathering, worships together at home, it cannot compare with our full assemblies that we have known and enjoyed on Sunday mornings – and will again, we pray, sooner rather than later! It can seem so long ago….
So, we undertake worship at home separated from each other as a congregation. But providing resources for worship at home is far from a solitary endeavor. In fact, it is very much a communal effort of members and staff at Resurrection Church. Some members have wondered with me about how our home worship resources are crafted and produced. It is indeed a labor-intensive effort that is a focal point for our life together as a congregation, even if those efforts are largely unseen by most members of our church.
By way of illustrating the communal nature of this endeavor, here’s a description of how we put it all together to make the home worship resources available to you each week. Hymns are chosen well in advance and orders of worship are drafted under my care and in consultation with members of the Worship and Music Committee. Our Office Administrator, Monika Carney, then puts the well-crafted bulletin together. Member, Gordon Lathrop, conceived the basic order of worship that we employ even before I arrived on the scene as pastor. He also writes weekly the brief summary paragraph in the bulletin that helpfully weaves the themes of the lectionary readings together for our reflection. Member, Gail Ramshaw, beautifully crafts our prayers of intercession which speak to the current needs and opportunities of our days in church, nation and world, drawing on the themes of the lectionary passages for each Sunday. I should also say that Gordon and Gail’s resources are made available to everyone in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and are used in some cases even internationally.
Member, Kim Harriz, is the one who makes the calls to secure other members to serve as readers and leaders of prayer. She has done an excellent job of recruiting a wide and diverse representation of RELC members, sometimes whole families, and sometimes members who have not taken leadership roles in worship before. Our member readers and prayer leaders then create their video recordings to be uploaded for editing for the home worship video.
Our interim music director, Barbara Verdile, creates her lovely musical meditations and renditions of the psalm in our church’s nave. She also rehearses with our choir each week, and choir members then generate their own individual video and audio recordings of the hymns and anthems which are then sent to Barbara who weaves it all together for a single, ensemble choral experience online.
Once the individual video files are created by me, our readers and prayer leaders and Barbara and our choristers, then one of our videographers – either members Carson Brooke, Daniel Cuesta or Lizzy Schoen – puts the video and audio files together, editing it all into the watch-through video which accompanies the bulletin materials, and individual video files.
Also accompanying the resources for home worship are Angie Brooke’s weekly children’s messages and Amanda Lindamood’s weekly resources for faith formation at home. I commend these resources for use by adults, too, as they are salutary not just for our children and youth!
Once the resources are compiled, Barbara and I take a final look at the worship video, suggest any editorial changes, and ultimately approve it for distribution. That’s when member Chris Smith makes our many resources available on our church website and member Paul Bastuscheck crafts a message with links to the materials in the Constant Contact message that goes out to our members. Office Administrator, Monika, also sends out hard copies of our home worship resources to those members who do not have access to computers or internet.
So, you can see that crafting and compiling and sending our home worship resources each week is quite the team effort, again, largely unseen by most congregation members. I’ve tried here to give a comprehensive overview of the work we do each week. Kindly let me know if I have overlooked any parts of the process and any of the participants!
Thus, I want to thank our unsung heroes of home worship at RELC for their many, many efforts, for all the hours and energy expended over the course of these eight months and counting. Thousand thanks to our many worship team leaders and those in the choir who sing and the many members who have served as readers and prayer leaders! And thanks be to God for these efforts. It is popularly said that the word “liturgy” can basically be understood as “the work of the people.” This reality is very much conveyed and embodied in the many members who offer themselves in the service of our current practices of worship at home. It’s far from a solitary endeavor! It’s also true that many hands make for lighter work, for which I am thankful.
My prayer is that this recounting of what goes into making our home worship resources available each week will deepen and enhance your experience and practice of worship at home. My prayer is also that your awareness of the communal nature of our shared efforts will help you feel connected with other members of our congregation even when worship at home might otherwise be a rather solitary endeavor that happens apart from our longed-for assemblies in person.
With deep and abiding appreciation in Christ Jesus for all who lead and serve our home worship life,
Pastor Jonathan Linman
Dear Friends in Christ:
Well, we know some of the results of the recent elections. We have a president-elect, though some dispute that. The Senate remains up for grabs in terms of which party holds the majority. We do not yet know how transitions will proceed. Unknowns persist.
But one clear outcome of the elections is the revelation of the extent of apparent divisions in our nation, how evenly divided we are even down to razor thin margins in some areas. Red states and blue states. Urban and rural. Coasts and the country’s midsections. White and persons of color. Republican and Democrat. In the minds of many, winners and losers. A house divided cannot stand…. What remains to be seen is what our current divisions may lead to in the coming weeks, months, and years.
It may well be that the extent of our divisions is at some level actively curated by various entrenched interests that seek to divide the populace in the service of the protection of their interests. Divide and conquer as an age-old strategy which various “powers that be” have enacted across the globe throughout the centuries. Keeping people on edge is good for ratings and thus advertisers. Keeping people anxious and angry is the most seductively easy way to lead, and this is true on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum.
But I wonder if our country’s people are as divided as various media would have us believe. If we could turn down the volume on the cacophonous political rhetoric, again on both sides of the spectrum, if we could strip discourse of ideological labels and jargon, again on both the left and right, I wonder if we could discover more common ground.
Dear Friends in Christ:
As you receive this message, we await the outcome of the elections. Whatever the results will be, the days, weeks, and months that lie before us will undoubtedly present us with challenges on many different fronts. We will need to be well-equipped for offering to the world confident, hopeful Christian witness. Thus, our particular season in our life together as church and nation calls for intensified efforts concerning adult Christian education and formation. Being formed in the faith for the work that God has entrusted to us for the sake of the world is not just for children and youth, especially now. Thus, I am committed as your Pastor to shepherding occasions and resources for adult Christian education in our congregation. I envision Resurrection as a community in which people of all ages and in varieties of family circumstances routinely engage together in various opportunities for Christian education that not only inform the mind, but form the heart and character for our ministry in daily life. The world needs our mature, faithful Christian witness that has been well-formed by lifelong Christian education.
These weekly messages from me are one way that I seek to live into a vision for expanded ministries of education and formation. I intentionally address a wide array of topics that reflect the comprehensive nature of our ministry and mission. I am most heartened when you engage me in conversation with your responses to these messages – via email, in person, on the phone. Let’s be in dialogue. Disagree with me when you feel moved, and don’t be afraid to let me know. I delight in such engagement, as it affords me the opportunity to elaborate on topics, going beyond where I can go in just a couple of pages of essay. I also welcome your suggestions of topics for future messages.
Another expansion of opportunities for adult education and formation are Bible Studies that incorporate lectio divina as a format for engaging the scriptures in studied and devotional ways that attend to both head and heart. In addition to a group that meets with me via Zoom on Thursday mornings at 11:00 every other week, a second and newer group meets on Monday evenings at 6:30 to explore Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. To date, about 15 people – a very heartening number – have committed to joining in this conversation. And I am pleasantly surprised that lectio divina as a format for engaging scripture works rather well via Zoom. It’s not too late to join in these opportunities – see specifics in the weekly announcement message.
Also heartening is the commitment to exploring racism in our church and nation and how we can be better formed to seek an end to this injustice. About 15 Resurrection members have committed to participating in monthly discussions of Pastor Lenny Duncan’s book, Dear Church: A Love Letter From a Black Preacher to the Whitest Denomination in the U.S. Because of the provocative nature of Pastor Duncan’s prophetic witness, we incorporate prayerful, spiritual practices into these discussions to keep us tethered to the peace of God which rests within us and among us as we move forward in conversation. In addition to these monthly book discussions, there are also the monthly Friday evening film screenings on works which also seek to widen our horizons about racism. These film screenings are intentionally intergenerational. Again, see the coming announcement messages for further information.
Furthermore, we have a number of members who are very capable teachers. While I may shepherd our adult education and formation initiatives as Pastor, I am certainly not the only one who will teach. As one shining example, consider our member, Gail Ramshaw, who has written voluminously in the service of the church and its witness over many decades. Since we just celebrated All Saints Day, and I have recently commended to you our Lutheran calendar of commemorations of the saints, I call to your attention a book that Gail wrote which helps us derive spiritual benefit from the many commemorations on our calendar: More Days for Praise: Festivals and Commemorations in Evangelical Lutheran Worship (Augsburg Fortress 2016). This lovely work contains information about each person commemorated along with devotional aids to help us gain a palpable sense that we are indeed surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses as we run the race that is set before us, ever looking to Jesus, to whom the saints point.
In short, we are attending to the life of the mind and heart at Resurrection Church, even when we cannot meet in person, so that we can be formed to proclaim a word of healing and hope to the world. I don’t think I’m misreading things, but I sense a good deal of energy and desire for occasions and resources for adult and intergenerational education and formation. Again, the number of participants is heartening to me, as are the resources and persons available to us. I also look forward to opportunities to expand on these current offerings. I am especially interested in exploring new formats for engaging in communal discernment about topics which generally create a lot of tension in our wider society. My prayer is that Resurrection Church in community will embody the kind of loving, respectful dialogue that is typically absent in other civic arenas currently. May our congregation grow to be a model for such respectful dialogue, especially when we can agree to disagree and still remain in genuine Christian community. For the church, as an embodiment of the dominion of God in Christ, is not a club for the like-minded. Rather, the church is inherently a very diverse community united in Christ for the world’s healing and salvation.
May God in Christ guide us in our holy conversations to form us for the work that God has entrusted to us for the sake of our broken world,
Pastor Jonathan Linman
Dear Friends in Christ:
I am drawn to call attention to what’s on the minds of most: Election Day is almost upon us, and many may feel like they are on pins and needles. The intersecting crises coinciding with this particular presidential election may seem too much to bear, especially when we have endured so much for so very many months. Given these realities, we need prayer more than ever. Bishop Ortiz invites you to daily prayer, as do I as your Pastor. Our Synod has crafted resources for our prayer during the days prior to and after the election.
Additionally, you may also be drawn to sing if you have a copy of Evangelical Lutheran Worship at home. Sing or pray through the texts of hymns such as "All our hope on God is founded" (ELW 757) or "God bless our native land" (ELW 891).
Here are excellent collects which I commend for your use at home, again from our Evangelical Lutheran Worship – pray these prayers even as you read them now:
God, our refuge and strength, you have bound us together in a common life. In all our conflicts, help us to confront one another without hatred or bitterness, to listen for your voice amid competing claims, and to work together with mutual forbearance and respect; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
O God, where hearts are fearful and constricted, grant courage and hope. Where anxiety is infectious and widening, grant peace and reassurance. Where impossibilities close every door and window, grant imagination and resistance. Where distrust twists our thinking, grant healing and illumination. Where spirits are daunted and weakened, grant soaring wings and strengthened dreams. All these things we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen.
Lord God, you call your people to honor those in authority. Help us elect trustworthy leaders, participate in wise decisions for our common life, and serve our neighbors in local communities. Bless the leaders of our land, that we may be at peace among ourselves and a blessing to other nations of the earth; through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen. (Evangelical Lutheran Worship, pew edition, pages 76-77)
Our individual prayers may be quite particular and for specific outcomes. But all of our prayers are ultimately most faithfully rooted in the fundamental sacred utterances which emerge from the pages of scripture, to paraphrase them – “Your will, not mine, be done, O God;” “Into your hands, O Lord, we commend our spirits;” “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.”
Remember also that when we do not know what to pray or how, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words (cf. Romans 8:26ff.). The Spirit’s prayer is the source of all of our other prayers.
With many heart-felt prayers for our life together in church, nation, and world in Jesus’ name,
Pastor Jonathan Linman
Dear Friends in Christ:
The crisis of the pandemic wears on, continuing to lead us to refrain from gathering for worship in person. As Covid cases surge in many places throughout the country, including the Northeast which had the virus under control for a time, and as colder weather will keep people indoors, raising the specter of further outbreaks of illness, it’s hard to imagine in-person, in-door gatherings anytime soon. Perhaps the novelty of our home worship video resources has worn off, for viewership among members of the congregation has decreased steadily in the months we’ve been offering the videos. I am concerned about the devotional well-being of you, God’s people, at home. But every crisis holds promise also for opportunity. Thus, I want to revisit the theme of encouraging worship and prayer at home, in the domestic church, by calling attention to a particular treasure that is readily and literally at hand, namely our book called Evangelical Lutheran Worship.
To be sure, we will continue to provide the varied resources to assist weekly worship at home, resources which draw from the treasury which is Evangelical Lutheran Worship. But there is so much more to discover in the book which can serve your devotion at home.
Dear Friends in Christ:
In our nation’s current hyper-partisan environment, many find it exhausting to talk about church and politics. So, let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about the church and money instead! Another not so popular topic…. Concerning things financial, for those not always actively engaged in the life of congregations, a common lament is this: “the only time the church contacts me is when they want my money….” This is a sad reality that reduces themes of stewardship and financial giving to meeting the church’s institutional needs.
Autumn is generally the time to gear up for stewardship campaigns, and so it is with Resurrection Church as well. Even amidst the pandemic and its strictures, we will engage something resembling our usual stewardship emphases this fall.
Actually, I don’t, in fact, want to talk about money. Rather I’ll tell a story of generosity. It’s a story that has led me frequently to offer the phrase, “generosity begets generosity.”
Dear Friends in Christ:
The decision by our Congregation Council to place signs – “Black Lives Matter” and “Hate Has No Home Here” – on church property continues to generate energies of response by members, those supportive of the signs’ placement and those opposed. Underneath the particularities of the issues which the signs address is the larger question of the relationship between church and state from a Lutheran perspective. Some believe that the church has no place in politics, that the separation between church and state is absolute, that the church should not preach politics. Others believe that the church has a legitimate role in the political arena.
We live in a time of particularly strident partisan divisions, a time of hyper-heightened political tension, a time when people are absolutely exhausted by all the partisan vitriol. Can’t the church simply be an oasis from such toxic energies? But we also live in a time of intersecting crises – pandemic, social unrest around racism, economic woes – which cry out for some concrete responses from the church beyond charitable giving which seek to address the underlying systemic sources of today’s woes. Our day may be an occasion when not speaking out has the quality of a “sin of omission,” which allows injustice to continue untrammeled. The decision to remain quiet and uninvolved is its own kind of political stance. Which is to say, we cannot ultimately avoid or escape politics as individuals and as a church.
Dear Friends in Christ:
What is prayer? Now, that’s a huge question and an enormous topic that cannot be fully addressed in a comparatively brief message. But here are some initial thoughts.
Lutherans have not listed prayer as a distinct means of grace, a way in which the gospel of Christ is made known to us. Lutherans name as forms of the gospel baptism, the Eucharist, preaching, absolution, and sometimes mutual conversation and consolation. But this certainly doesn’t mean that Lutherans don’t pray. Rather, I would suggest that we are called to engage the means of grace prayerfully.
But what is prayerful engagement? For me, a foundational biblical statement on prayer is found in the letter to the Romans, where Paul writes, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26) Some ancient authorities add to this verse “for us” – “that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” Insofar as the Holy Spirit is given to us at baptism, and that our bodies are thus “temples of the Holy Spirit” (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:19), and insofar as the church is the body of Christ through which the Holy Spirit breathes and is active, there is a palpable sense in which the Holy Spirit both prays in us as individual members of Christ’s body, and prays among us communally as the church. Seeing this reality as foundational, prayer as a faith practice serves to call our attention to and perhaps makes us increasingly aware of the prayerful intercession of the Holy Spirit going on all the time within us and among us. Only by the Holy Spirit’s action can we achieve the apostle’s exhortation to “pray without ceasing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17)
In short, the Spirit’s prayer for us and in and among us and our own attempts at prayer are a common thread running through the means of grace, binding them together as manifestations of the effective, saving gospel for us and for the world through the power of the Spirit. Thus, we preach prayerfully, and prayerfully engage the sacraments and confession and forgiveness, and engage in prayerful, holy conversation.
Dear Friends in Christ:
If you’ve been to the church or driven by recently, you will have noticed signs on our church property: “Black Lives Matter” and “Hate has No Home Here.” The placement of these signs was the result of a vote by our elected leaders who serve as members of the Congregation Council. Not unexpectedly, these signs have stirred some controversy among some members, as well as some in our neighborhood community. There are those who support the placement of signs, and those who oppose our church making such visible statements.
But they are signs of the times. I cannot speak for the Council either as individual members or as a body, but my sense is that the intertwined crises of our days in our nation evoked significant energy to say something, to begin to address the concerns of our day.
I have written before that we live in apocalyptic-seeming times – especially when you consider the etymology of the word apocalypse, which has to do with uncovering, unveiling, revealing. The crises of the pandemic, of protests resulting from a long line of people of color dying at the hands of police officers, and of economic hardship of Great Depression proportions for many – these crises have in common that in each case, persons of color often suffer the most. This set of realities reveals that racism in many forms persists as a deep and abiding problem in our nation. It is time to confront racism head on and to seek racial justice in ways faithful to the gospel.
Dear Friends in Christ:
Given all that’s going on in nation and world, it can be challenging to maintain one’s healthy perspective on our current circumstances in life. In fact, with all the roiling news stories that clamor for our attention, I find it easy to lose perspective on the bigger picture, getting lost also in the details and daily demands of to do lists. My vantage point can too easily narrow to the point where I miss seeing things from the perspective of a more divine vantage point.
How can we seek to keep a healthy and sacred perspective on our lives and all that is happening in world? Let me share with you some of what I do to try to maintain perspective. I offer this in the spirit of Martin Luther who wrote a letter about his prayer life to his barber, “A Simple Way to Pray,” where he told Master Peter, the barber, this is how I do it.
Dear Friends in Christ:
A week after I took up residence in Arlington in mid-May, I devoted my midweek message to listing the various activities going on at Resurrection Church even amidst the pandemic’s necessary, love-of-neighbor inspired restrictions on congregation activities in person. We’re still in that same boat, largely sheltering at home.
Now that we are on the cusp of beginning what would normally be a new church program year, I want to revisit the question, “What’s happening at church?” I offer this for your encouragement and to proclaim that we continue to be and to do church, even if it’s still in limited ways.
Dear Friends in Christ:
Martin Luther was a prolific writer. He wrote about an astonishing array of topics. Unlike another major reformer, John Calvin, Luther did not compose volumes of a systematic theology. Rather, Luther’s writings were more ad hoc, addressing concerns of his day in church and world in the form of treatises, letters, pamphlets, sermons, and more. Quite germane to our own day, Luther wrote a piece on “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague” in 1527, ten years after he posted the Ninety-Five Theses. This writing was a response to a pastoral colleague who enquired about what a faithful response to plague may be, for an epidemic was ravaging parts of Germany at the time. Then as now, persons of means could escape the more urban epicenters of virus to rural enclaves.
Some of what Luther has to say in his writing on the plague is quite dated, for example, reflecting medical knowledge of his day that does not accord with our current-day scientific understandings. We might also object to Luther’s conclusion that the plague is part of God’s judgment on humanity. Nevertheless, there is much wisdom that still rings true today. Here is what I learned from Luther in re-reading his reflections on faithful responses to deadly plague, wisdom that continues to be instructive for us in our own time of pandemic. [Quotes from Luther are from “Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague” found in The Annotated Luther, Volume 4, Pastoral Writings, Mary Jane Haemig, ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016) – available in our church library, and page references below are in parentheses.]
Dear Friends in Christ:
I’ve written on at least a few occasions that there is no single, universal experience of the pandemic. Each of us endures the rigors of this extended time of crisis in unique ways, according to our varied circumstances and personalities. In the truthfulness of self-disclosure, my biggest struggles personally are the social isolation, since I live by myself, and also wondering when next it will be safe for travel so that I can see my son. Not knowing when that will be is unsettling to say the least.
Professionally, again to be honest with you, my struggle centers on my vocational identity as a pastor – what the word pastor means – in relation to our current circumstances. Pastor is from the Latin, meaning shepherd. A shepherd has a flock, a gathering of sheep, together in a place, the sheepfold or the grazing pastures. It is deep in my vocational DNA to want to tend those in my care, not just one on one, but as a community. That we cannot gather, that we cannot assemble as has been usual custom throughout the Christian millennia on Sunday, the Lord’s Day, persists in being unnerving to me, especially since I have no history with you at all as a gathered flock! A congregation congregates, it gathers. The church is ecclesial, from the Greek and Latin, meaning more or less to call out for the calling together. We cannot now safely undertake this basic Christian practice of assembling in person. To preclude such a fundamental Christian reality is like removing the foundation of our household of faith. I cannot tell you how disorienting this is to me as a pastor.
Dear Friends in Christ:
Words are inadequate to capture how much I miss our weekly celebrations of Holy Communion. The Eucharist, of course, is central to Christian life and practice, and it is a pillar of my own piety, the removal of which during the pandemic has thrown out of balance my Christian faith practice and has diminished my sense of spiritual well-being. As a pastor in Christ’s church, I long to preside at the holy table again. As one of the baptized, I yearn for the gift of Christ’s real presence made available to the whole assembly of the faithful via earthly gifts through the word and the Spirit.
So, if Holy Communion is so central and important, why not just do it? Why not get back to the practice of Holy Communion by any means possible? These are complex questions which invite careful exploration. Indeed, Resurrection’s Reopening Planning Group is attending to how it may be that we could celebrate Holy Communion during the pandemic when we would worship again in person. A central challenge is that the way we have administered the Communion – breaking pieces of the blessed bread and placing into the hands of communicants and passing a common cup from which we all drink – is deemed unsafe from a public health perspective. Thus, we are forced to consider different ways of accomplishing the logistics of sharing bread and cup.
