The wildfires rage again this summer. I hope you’re staying safe and also still getting time outdoors and in nature. Amanda is continues to learn about areas of the Truckee Meadows, and it’s a bummer to have to explain some neighborhoods or towns by their proximity to certain ridge-lines of smoke.
“How close is Loyalton?” she’ll ask. And how should I respond?! “Not close enough where we have to evacuate.” But also, “Not far!”
We’re homemaking in the wildness of fire season. Tending, untamed.
And while that wasn’t Shaun’s idyllic song to Amanda about what life in Reno was going to hold … it feels ok because it feels true. Tending, untamed. Like naming the truth draws us closer to hope (and to each other) because of the clarity. Yes, clarity even in the smoke.
And clarity in the wildness of God, too. Like a nature writer I like, Belden Lane, puts it: “There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul.”
Is this some clarity for the Kingdom of Heaven alive and in our world too?
I think maybe it is. Because, in God’s way, we are not aiming at an escape plan from the world we make together. We’re setting tables inside of this fierce world.
Take the gospel for this coming Sunday: When the disciples tell Jesus that they are in a deserted place (or, for instance, a desert landscape on fire) and they all need to go home to eat, to get respite from the harshness of where they are, Jesus doesn’t want to go away now. Instead he says: You feed these hungry people!
So, we set tables up. Jesus turns the fear and scarcity into abundance and joy. And I think the tables of our church keep aiming to do the same thing ever since.
Faith Lutheran Church in Reno, NV celebrates 70 years this year. And we’ll celebrate together with worship and church BBQ on August 23rd! This building, and the people (who are the church) have been a table of Christ’s body in Reno long enough to have weathered fire seasons before this one, long enough to have held funerals and baptisms and every ordinary Sunday in between.
A table of sustenance and welcome in this fierce world — that is the church. And we’re still Proclaiming Faith Together, celebrating the faithful past and serving into the fierce future. Tending, untamed, by the call of God.
Thanks be to God for the table, for that ways that we are each served in the wildness of love, and for how Christ’s love is tending to this fierce world with his ever-present grace, even through us.
Cheers to the years to come!,
+Pr Shaun