Broken Glass

The break-ins that took place late this summer is a gift that just keeps giving. We have finally finished up with all the window repairs that needed to take place to remediate the damage that

was done. We needed some special kinds of glass because we are a public facility and the glass was in many cases in office doors. That is a good thing: it helps make our church safer with an "open door" counseling committment. However, doors also require special tempered glass to be safe. Such glass breaks into little pebbles of glass rather than saber sharp shards of glass.

Some of our new best friends are the fellows at Rock Island Glass Company. They were prompt in helping secure the building and ordered and installed the glass we needed. The made the critical repairs immediately and some of the less critical ones they did over a period of time. We were grateful for their good work. I think the final outcome was sixteen panes of glass and over $2000 in expense. The amount of glass damage was almost as much as the value of the stolen articles.

(Of course, there was also the expense of the professional clean up when toner from the copy machine was thrown around the office, and also the hours and hours of work lost when the computers were taken.)

It is sometimes difficult to keep a positive attitude when I think about the damage done and the ego-centric attitude that a person must have to attack the house of God and do damage to door after door to steal things for personal gain. This is a living out of the attitude that its-all-about-me.

What we really need now is a patient painter and repair person to touch up the trim and paint on the doors that have had panes of glass replaced. Are you that person? Let me know.

Frauen Verein Window

About ten years ago the church was doing some significant renovation in the sanctuary. The Bell Choir requested that the seating and riser be removed from the balcony so that they could both rehearse and play their music in worship from that location. When the seating was removed from the balcony it revealed a whole of the rosette window. Only the top portion had been visible before that time. At the bottom we could read that it had been Gestiftit vom Frauen Verein, given by the Women's Guild of the church.

The window has in the center the cross and the crown, and is a generally handsome work. It is from the earliest era of construction, around 1912. A generous church member provided funds for cleaning the window and replacing the protective cover on the outside. The earlier cover had clouded over time. And a bright light on a timer was installed in the choir loft area, so that the window would be illuminated at night to provide some beauty in our neighborhood and a witness to the faith.

The light shines out.

It would be fair to say that our neighborhood has some of the lowest priced real estate in the city and some low income people. There is not a lot of public art. This is a positive addition.

Some time later I was attending a meeting at one of our churches in Elgin, Illinois. The church is downtown and there is another church directly across the street. I looked up at the outside of the other church building across the street and noticed an interesting array of pipes and lights, and a rosette window. This church had also provided illumination for their rosette window - the lights were hung outside of the building so the the worshippers inside the building could enjoy the beauty of the window when they had a evening service. Their light shines in.

I bless God for the spirit that chooses to put the light on the inside to provide beauty on the outside rather than putting the light on the outside to provide beauty for those on the inside. Not only does the symbolism of cross and crown witness to the faith, but to put the light on the inside for the benefit of the neighborhood is also a witness to the spirit of the Christ.

Totenfest

The Church of Peace has a tradition of marking day called "Totenfest" in the fall. This word means "Feast of the Dead" and was established in 1816 by Prussian Emperor Fredrick William III to remember soldiers who had died in the then most recent war. The Evangelical Church in Germany made the day a time not only to remember soldiers, but also all those of the congregation who had died in the last year. A churchly memorial day. Totenfest was on the last Sunday of the year, right before Advent began.

Since the Church of Peace has German Evangelical roots, Totenfest has been marked here as long as anyone can remember.

In the last several years we have used the first Sunday of November, rather than the last Sunday before Advent. This makes our Totenfest correspond to All Saints Sunday that is celebrated by other Christians.

On that day we read out the names of all those church members and church friends who have died in the previous year, and toll the bell of the church. Those so remembered in our congregation this year were:

Roger Altman,

Ruby Armstrong,

Euphemia Bernauer,

Elizabeth Harland,

Larry Held,

Margaret Kelly,

Corey Miller,

Mary Shaner,

Karen Streider,

Velma Talberg and

Donald Wilson.

Another element of the service in the last several years has been to invite members of the congregation to bring photos of their family members and loved ones to place on tables in the sanctuary. This practice comes from the Bible passage in Hebrews: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, ..." Many families have come to participate in this practice and bring photos with them.

On a liturgical basis, this gives church members a way to engage more fully in the remembrance of those saints who have gone before us in life. It is a way of making this holy day more real, and extend the inclusion beyond the particular families who have lost a loved one in the last 12 months.

The marking of All Saints and Totenfest has some additional benefits as well. We Americans tend to be very individualistic and tend to think that we have made ourselves. Many of us also lack a sense of history. This day reminds us that we are part of a family, a progression of people who are connected generation to generation. This connection is both biological, and also social, in communities such as the church. This is a day to remember our gratitude to those who have gone before us. And by implication, this day reminds us that we will one day ourselves be dead, and the community will either be better off because of our efforts in our time and place, or not.

Years ago, when I was the pastor of First United Methodist Church of Redwood City, California, we were embarking on a much needed program to paint and refurbish some parts of the church. There were two older church leaders, fellows, who had different points of view. One fellow, whom I will call "Noel," said something like, "Well, I won't be here to see it in any case, so what do I care?" Another fellow, I will call him George, said, "I know that I won't be here in the next century, so I want to do all I can to make sure this church is as strong as I can make it for future generations."

How do we help more people see the world like George and not like Noel? I think a perspective like George's is not only a benefit to churches, but would also be a help in addressing issues like Global Warming and the running up of a very large national debt. It is my hope that when we can dramatize the inter-generational connections of the human family with days like Totenfest and All Saints we contribute to a more George-like perspective.

Barak = blessing

Well, along with the majority of American voters I was pleased with the victory of Barack Obama for president.



Living in Iowa I feel a special involvement, since our caucus process got him started on the way back on January 3. We went over to Pleasant View School, where Nancy works as a speech therapist and where both out daughters attended. There was the largest crowd I have seen for a caucus since we moved to Iowa, and Barack won. Our college-student daughter, Becca went along with a little dis-ease, since this was her first caucus. She immediately saw some of her friends and got right into the process. It was all pretty exciting.



I have heard a lot of analysis of Barack Obama's victory and I am sure some of it is right. Here are a few observations that I haven't heard, and are personal to me, that may be interesting.



*The word BARAK means "blessing" in Hebrew. I dug up my old text book to make sure. Once again this points up the similarities between Hebrew and Arabic. I pray that our next president will indeed be a blessing. The country has lots of challenges/problems and he has his work cut out for him. When the campaign began Barak Obama was a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. My church is part of the United Church of Christ and we need to keep our president in our prayers.



*The older of the two Obama daughters is named MALIA. Her name means "Mary" in the Hawaiian language. Since Polynesian alphabets have fewer letters than those of European languages there is some letter substitution when European names are rendered in Polynesian. Robert becomes "Lopeti." (L substitutes for R; P substitutes for B) Richard becomes "Lisiate." You can see the drift. "Malia" for a name reminds us that this will be our first president with such connection to Hawaii. Here in the Midwest there is great interest that he will be the third president from Illinois - along with Lincoln and Grant. How exciting this must be for folks in Hawaii.



*Being a "community organizer" is not looking so bad this morning. Back in the 1970s our church took on a new direction in ministry and got involved with church based community organizing as a way of approaching ministry. We were instrumental in putting together, with other churches, a group called the Community Caring Conference (CCC), which shares office space with us to this day. Since Chicago is the center of the universe for community organizing we approached the Gamaliel Foundation for training, and many on our church staff have been trained by Gamaliel over the years. When vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was poking fun at community organizer as a job title there was a level of discontent with the community organizers at the CCC, and with me, as I too have organizer training. Well, face-to-face, feet-on-the-ground community organizing is looking effective this November morning, and community organizer can be counted among honorable work possibilities.





*Barack Obama represents a new generation. If you will, the United States has had two Baby Boomer presidents - Bill Clinton and George W Bush. And now we have gone to the next younger generation. I am a Boomer. I was in Junior High when Obama was born. Some of my issues are simply not Barack Obama's issues, and that may be a blessing. As I was looking at the hundreds of thousands of people having a good time in Grant Park in Chicago last night, a beautiful, warm, fall night in the midwest, my mind travelled back to 1968. And at the Democratic Convention that year in Chicago there was violence against people of my generation in that same Grant Park. There was a lot of conflict around the world in 1968. I wrote about the violence at Talatelolco in October 1968. It was in 1968 that Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and also Bobby Kennedy. Maybe it is a good thing that with a younger president he can look to the future more than to the past. While experience can sometimes be an asset, certain kinds of experiences can give a person a negative attitude.

Anniversary Sunday

This last Sunday, October 26, 2008 was a great day of celebration. We marked the 113th Anniversary of the Church of Peace. We dedicated a rebuilt echo organ. We celebrated 40 years of service by our Music Director, Mary Kae Waytenick.

Our congregation was organized in 1895 among German speaking immigrants in Rock Island, Illinois. We were a mission of the Iowa Council of the German Evangelical Church.

The pipe organ we use weekly was first installed in 1927. As you might guess, it has gone through substantial renovation over the years. The keyboard console has been relocated several times. In 1997 there was a major renovation. While the pipes themselves were retained and re-used the wind boxes were rebuilt and the mechanism for opening a valve and allowing air to blow through the pipe was totally rebuilt by the Levson Organ Company of Buffalo, Iowa. That was completed for the main part of the organ. There is a smaller echo organ chamber located on the other side of the chancel from the main organ, and this part of the organ was not rebuilt till 2008. So for the first time we heard the two parts of the organ play together again this last Sunday. This has been an expensive project. We are grateful to a generous donor who underwrote the project to rebuild the echo organ and chimes.

Mary Kae Sederquist began to play as the organist of the church in 1967 when she was a sophomore at Augustana College in Rock Island. Since that time there have been two major times away for her. The first was a recuperation from a serious automobile accident. The second was when she earned her master's degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Since 1976 she has been the church organist on a continuing basis. In addition to being an excellent musician, Mary Kae is a teacher and talented at organizing and calling out the musical gifts of others. She writes and arranges music for the choral and instrumental groups at the church. She encourages children and youth in their music and creates a safe environment in which they can share their music.

As you might imagine, with so many years of service and having touch the lives of so many people, it was a great day to celebrate with Mary Kae. She was surprised by having Flutes Unlimited, a group with which she has been associated, come to church and play their flutes. The church choir wrote a tribute song and sang it to her. Many musicians who know her work attended worship. Walter Haedrich played special music during the service. Carol Hubbard added to the service with keyboard music. All in all it was a great day.

Rhys Fullerlove took some video of the service which will be on the Church of Peace website. If you click on the photo of the church at the right side of the article it will take you to the website.

Niebuhr Family

When I decided to attend seminary in the late 1960s a friend of mine, Bob Wilson, kindly gave me a little paperback book called A Layman's Guide to Protestant Theology, by William Hordern. This book had been first published in 1955 by The Macmillan Company. Bob said that it would be helpful because it not only gave sketches of several theologians, but also outlined the basic ideas of the several schools of theological thinking current at the time. I read the book the summer before entering seminary in 1969.



There can be no question that Reinhold Niebuhr is the most important living American theologian. This sentence begins the chapter on American Neo-Orthodoxy. (p.147) The particular seminary I attended emphasized Process Theism, and although I read some about Neo Orthodoxy it was not something I studied deeply. I dated a woman who for a time assisted Reinhold Neibuhr in preparing documents when she was living at Union Seminary in New York City. This was where Neibuhr had taught, and he was living on the campus in retirement. He died in 1971.



When in 1991 I was called the the Church of Peace United Church of Christ in Rock Island, Illinois I realized that I was in Neibuhr country. Neibuhr graduated from Eden Theological Seminary in St Louis, Missouri. So had every minister who had served the Church of Peace before me. I had graduated from Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.

"What did you attend that Congregationalist seminary for?" challenged Bert Kutz, the widow of one of the previous pastors who attended Eden. "I lived in California," I replied, weakly. "Swartz," Bert continued. "That's a German name. Good!" Even if I had not gone to either Eden Seminary of Elmhurst college, my forbears were German immigrants in the post 1850 period, as had most of the early members of the church. That gave us some common ground. Bert read the Christian Century magazine, which Neibuhr had helped edit for years. Her late husband, Ludwig, had read it for years, so Bert just kept it up. I, too, had been reading the Christian Century since I had been in seminary. So this gave Bert and I more in common.



I realized some time later that while Neibuhr had been born in Missouri he had grown up in Lincoln, Illinois. His father, Gustav Niebuhr, had been pastor of St. John's Church in Lincoln. Both Church of Peace in Rock Island and St John's in Lincoln had been German Evangelical Churches at their founding, and had merged with the German Reformed in the 1930s, to become part of the Evangelical and Reformed Church, and then with the 1958 with the Congregationalists to form the United Church of Christ. I snapped a photo of the historical sign at St Johns when I was at that church for a meeting last month.





I don't want to outline Neibuhr's whole career and many books here. If you Google his name you can find lots and lots of information. But I do have one or two observations.

I think Neibuhr's prominence increased greatly when he was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1948. Few Theologians are so newsworthy. You can find the cover and the cover story on Time Magazine's website. www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19480308,00.html

A few years back I read the material and realized that his point of view was far more realistic about what had been happening in Europe leading up to the Second World War. Partly that was because he was at Union Seminary with the likes of Tillich and Bonhoeffer. We often forget that the bulk of American theologians at that time were pretty skeptical of engagement in Europe and critical of war as a means of dealing with conflict. They were generally pretty optomistic about humanity and slow to realize just how bad things were becoming.

Neibuhr was far more sanguine, and considered the war against the Nazi's to be a just war. I think that the reason that he was featured in Time is that his point of view turned out to be far more correct than those of many other theologians at the time.

In addition to his general theological stance of "Christian realism" I have come to believe that the fact that his family was bi-lingual German and English, and that worship in the German Evangelical Church was for fairly recent immigrants, and often in the German language, contributed to a far clearer understanding of the situation in Germany in his family and in his church than most Americans expereinced. The German Evangelical Church and the Neibuhr family was more international in stance - they were reading the European periodicals and writing back and forth to family members who were living there. I think Reinhold Neibuhr was far more knowledgable about specifics of what was taking place in Germany than were most American theologians. His interest and knowledge was specific and he was well informed.

As you might well imagine, those of us in the United Church of Christ here in Illinois are proud of Reinhold Niebuhr and his brother H. Richard Niebuhr and the contribution that this whole family has made over the years. I am glad to have been grafted in, even though I went to that Congregationalist seminary out in California.

Redwood City

Where does the time go? Here I am with my older daughter Taylor in front of the parsonage of the First United Methodist Church of Redwood City, California. I was appointed to that church in the early 1980s. It was while I was there that Nancy and I were married. And it was while we were there that our first daughter was born. I was pastor of that church for six years and had a good time in that assignment.

I think the congregation enjoyed their "young parsonage family." We certainly received a lot lof kindly attention and support. It turns out that the Redwood City Church sponsors a center for infants and toddlers as part of their mission and ministry. So Taylor was able to go with me to church each morning and stay at the center as I did my work. This center was a wonderful blessing to our family on a personal basis, as well as a great resource to the wider community.