I was sitting in the board room at church last week, having just finished two zoom meetings when the people I was meeting with arrived for my third meeting and told me that the Queen had died. 

I had just checked the news only about 45 minutes prior and knew that her doctors were concerned. Her family had been summoned and I had seen the Twitter reports that the BBC news readers were already in their black ties. This didn’t feel like the previous health scares. 

Most of us were either very young or not alive at all the last time a monarch died. While 3/4 of my lineage is Norwegian, a quarter of me is Scottish and Welsh.  

I am also the son and grandson of royal watchers, and so had to endure waiting in crowds for the briefest of glimpses of visiting royals growing up. I also had to watch royal weddings and funerals whenever they were broadcast on TV.  But I am sure that I am not the only one whose family had a love for royal things. 

Many of these images provided some of the touchstone moments of our history. Now we are about to witness another in about a week. 

As we grieve the Queen in the days to come, I cannot help but think of my own grandmother, 98 years old. From the same cohort and stock, she was a women whose life was also marked by service to her community as a Pastor’s wife. I am sure we all have loved ones in our lives who come to mind as we ponder the Queen’s 70-year legacy. As much as she was a remarkable woman, the Queen is also symbolic of an era of rapid innovation and loss, from World War 2 and the invention of TV all the way to the internet and COVID-19 Pandemic. 

As I talked with a parishioner this week, our discussion of the Queen led us to memories growing up in the horse a buggy, pre-electricity era. We compared that reality to the fact that my watch today can show pictures, tell me the weather, send text message and measure my heartbeat.

The Queen’s death is a time to grieve all the that has taken place during her reign and how the world in which she first ascended to the throne is completely different from the world she leaves behind.

Just in the days before the Queen died, we also bore witness to the terrible tragedy that just happened at James Smith Cree Nation and Weldon. Horrible acts of violence that will take a long time for families and communities to heal from. Not to mention that the story of the perpetrators of this violence is connected to Canada’s history of colonialism, most clearly symbolized by the Crown. 

They are reminders that in these days we are experiencing grief upon grief, and it is complicated and messy. 

As we contend with our experience of grief in the days to come, we will be reminded of all the change that happened in the world during these past 70 years. We also be reminded of how that change has impacted us personally. 

In a rapidly changing world, there is so much that we must leave behind, so much to feel as though we have lost. It will be a big change to see a different face on our coins, to sing God Save the King, to change the name of all the public institutions titled after the Queen that will now belong to the King. Reminders of change and loss, and I am not so certain that we are ready to find hope in the ‘new’ either quite yet.  

As we grieve the Queen and a changing world, the thing that we can hold onto is our faith. Perhaps more accurately, and what I often tell to families grieving a loved one, God is holding onto us. 

Even as we struggle with all that is taking place around us, even as we feel as though we are losing much to the pace of change, even as there is much grief to bear these days, God promises that we do not bear it alone. 

Instead, we bear it together, we navigate this changing world in the body of Christ, in community. We given each other to hold on to, and we are held by the love of God. God who knows grief and has walked this path before, and who will see us through to the other side. 

And now for something completely different…

For the past couple of months or so, I have been watching the Netflix show Stranger Things. It first came out in 2017 and for some reason I didn’t get into it. I really should have been really excited to watch it as it checks a lot of boxes that match my interests. It is set in the mid-80s, the era of my childhood. It focuses on a group of friends who play Dungeons & Dragons together and do other nerdy things. There is a healthy dose of pre-teen and teen angst navigating the challenges of school, relationships and growing up. 

Behind all of this is the fact the there is a government science lab running secret tests that result in some pretty fantastical stuff involving monsters, portals to other dimensions, missing friends and danger that could end the whole world. Of course, the kids who play Dungeons & Dragons who understand the world of fantasy are the only ones who can really figure out what is going on. 

While I can see myself and my childhood in the kids in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, it is the adult characters that I identify with. I understand the sheer panic of Winona Ryder’s character, Joyce, when her son goes missing, and her determination to do anything to save him. 

But it is the Chief of Police Jim Hopper whom I cannot help but identify with. He is a big shabby grump with a tragic back story, who ends up caring about the kids of Hawkins and Joyce more than he ever thinks possible. I can see that without Courtenay, Oscar and Maeve I might have found myself living a similarly grumpy and shabby life. 

Now, what does this all have to do with church? Well, this week we are about to hear one of the most familiar parables of the bible, the Good Samaritan. A parable so common and whose image is so powerful that we encounter it frequently in culture, despite most biblical images falling out of the cultural awareness. (A metaphor that even Stranger things uses in on episode). 

Though the Good Samaritan is story that we often think is about doing good works, caring for our neighbours even when it doesn’t benefit us, it isn’t really about that at all. 

The Good Samaritan a parable Jesus uses to warn against the temptation to save or justify ourselves. To try and be the hero of our own stories, or take control of our lives and world and do it all alone. 

This is where Stranger Things meets the Bible. 

A common theme through the seasons of Stranger Things is that when one character thinks that they have to solve a problem, take on a mission alone or be the sole hero, they ultimately fail. It is always in team work that they succeed. 

This Sunday, this is precisely what we are going to explore. Now how the Good Samaritan is an example of how to care for our neighbour, but in fact why this parable is telling us the truth that we cannot do it alone, that we cannot save ourselves, that we cannot justify ourselves. 

The Good Samaritan is one of my favourite passages from the bible because when it is truly explored, it undoes our first thought about its meaning. And instead reveals to us what God is actually up to in our world and how God meets us right in the moments we are sure we don’t need God anymore. 

Looking forward to Sunday.

On Monday, the fourth of July I will be remembering an important anniversary in my life and my time in ministry. No, not American Independence Day. Only that I was ordained as a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) on July 4^th, 2009. 

I was 26 at the time and went from being a full-time student my entire adult life to serving a congregation on my own as “The Pastor.” I was full of enough naive and youthful confidence that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. 

Still, my immediate experience was that my sense of the future church was much different than nearly everyone I was working with.   Most of the church leaders and most of my colleagues were old enough to be my parents or grandparents. It wasn’t long before it became clear that most people when imagining the church were thinking one or two or five years down the road, if they were thinking forward at all. Often times the church of people’s imagining was a church 10, 25 or 50 years prior. 

My first pension plan statement really brought home the difference for me. My expected retirement was in 2048 – 39 years from my starting date. 

Well, this year I am about one third of the way into those 39 years, and if you did the math based on my ordination date and age, you will know that there is a milestone birthday coming up for me. 

With my 13th anniversary of ordination on the horizon, I have to say that things aren’t much changed. I still spend a lot of my time speculating about what the church will look like between now and 2048. Not just because it is my retirement year. Now, I often think about the church of my children’s future, and what it will look like for them. 

I think a lot of people in church leadership these days, whether lay or ordained, might think I am still naive for imagining a church that exists that far into the future. For a lot of people, imagining a church that is NOT closed one, two, five or ten years from now is really hard. 

In fact, a lot of the big questions that loomed in the background in the past decade or two have been pushed to the forefront. Questions are on our minds more than ever about whether or not the church that many have known for the past 50, or 60 or 70 years can survive into the future.

Certainly it is on my mind. 

But let me say this, even though there are big questions demanding to be answered just ahead of us, I don’t think I have ever felt less concerned about the church’s survival than I am now in 2022. I think the church needs to change and the way we do ministry together needs continued adaptation, but I can picture the church of 2048 as clearly as I ever have been able to. 

Thirteen years ago I was often planning for the church of the future, and that hasn’t changed for me. 

As I have been musing about visioning for the past three weeks, I hope it has been clear that I think God is calling us into the future. A future already prepared by God, a future that will stretch and challenge us, a future that will make the church look even more different than it has since the 1950s. It will be hard, and it will be exciting. 

But most of all, I believe that God will carry us through. Even when we are sure that the end has come for us, or think that it isn’t worth the effort anymore, God will show us the way. 

In fact, if there is something I learned in 13 years of ministry, God is already showing us the way to the next thing. The question is whether we are ready to go along for the journey.