An ode to the Nordic and Celtic Services at Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota

This post was put on a blog about worship at Pilgrim. Quite an extraordinary post.

Ode to the Nordic and Celtic Services at Pilgrim Lutheran Church

Please comment on ELCA Human Sexuality Statement

A reminder to send in your responses to the ELCA Human Sexuality Draft Social Statement. Responses are recommended to be sent in by Sept. 1, although the official deadline is Nov. 1. Recall that we at Pilgrim studied the statement this past year. You can review the statement at:

ELCA Draft Statement on Human Sexuality

You can send your response in on-line, at

Online response form
Or, you can respond by sending your response (using the questions in the back of the draft statement) by standard mail to the following address:
Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality
Church in Society
8765 W. Higgins Rd
Chicago , IL 60631

Where I find the face of Jesus

Recently, I have started trying to connect with Jesus. Not the historical person and not the Christ I was taught about in Sunday school, but the concept of Jesus. I know that is a terribly abstract word to use, but it’s how I have to start.

So, I sit in meditation posture – it is always good to set quietly with a straight spine – and I ask about Jesus. What is this energy? What is Christ energy?

The images that come immediately are from my childhood, famous paintings: Jesus kneeling in prayer in Gethsemane, the light of our heavenly father illuminating his beautific face.

I think: this will not do. Jesus was a Jew from a desert. I know he died young, but he worked hard, fought the religious leadership, fought the government, surely he lost a lot of sleep and had wrinkles though he died young.

I try again. I get the picture offered me as a child. Jesus in pure white robes, arms stretched wide, welcoming the little children to come unto him. Again, this did not work for me then and it is not part of my life now. That Jesus was in a foreign country. The church did not tell me how Jesus was part of my life in America in the 1960s.

I heard Jesus’ message outside the church, in the peace movement and the civil rights marches. Jesus never advocated for “just war,” he never rationalized that the killing of soldiers and bystanders was justified by the dream of installing democracy. Jesus never said people could be separate but equal. He never said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, the white ones to my left knee, the black ones to my right knee.”

That’s when the face of Jesus came to me: Martin Luther King, Jr., specifically, a film clip I once saw of Dr. King. It was taken a few days before he was shot to death. He was talking to a companion, his face was in profile. He was exhausted, discouraged, disillusioned. He despaired, but he wasn’t giving up. He had seen wickedness and ignorance and hatred and remained committed to seeking justice through nonviolence.

That is the face of Jesus. A face weary but not giving up.

There are many faces of Jesus, of course. My brother-in-law has a drawing of Jesus laughing. It is a lovely, cheery face that speaks to my in-law, a man who ministered to grade school children as a teacher for thirty years. Maybe my brother-in-law is the face of Jesus. My sister, as well. She sure gets tired and discouraged learning that some of her second graders get themselves to school without any adult’s assistance. Many of her little students come from homes in which the adults live out the confusion of drugs and alcohol. My sister strives to make her students know they are important and loved.

Reva Rasmussen, Deacon

Returnees to church

I have a new way to think about myself as a Christian: I’m a returnee. I found this term while reading a chapter from Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith by Diana Butler Bass.

I am one of those people – a Christian who is uncomfortable with the term Christian. I can tell you it is because I have heard Christian being misused and, worse yet, used abusively in recent years.

But I fell away from the church many years back, before Christianity was coopted into politics and imperialism. I left because I could see the tendency towards this.

And I left because I am an explorer and a doubter and one who questions. I need to be brought face up to the unfamiliar and faraway.

Now I’ve come back to my roots to take another look at them and the roots have branched out, the tree has grown, the arms have opened. It’s not the church I left, but maybe it’s a church that has reached back to its origins for clarification. I have gotten this idea from the scholars at Pilgrim. There is so much to learn!

Diana Butler Bass writes: “On my journey, the vast majority of people I met did not grow up in the churches they currently attend. For almost everyone, their spiritual and personal quests had taken them away from their childhood faiths — if they had any — through periods of longing, questioning, and a sustained search to “find home.” Their stories often described a kind of religious displacement; many of the people depicted themselves almost as spiritual refugees.”

That’s me! I am comforted and astonished to find out I fit into a category. Maybe I’m also disappointed to not be too singular to escape labeling, but I’m heartened to know I am not alone. There are many others like me, and church leaders are thinking and writing about us. They are strategizing how to get us to show up at church and, once we walk through that door, how to keep us coming back. They want to know, what are our spiritual needs?

We are returnees who come in with ideas we’ve learned from Buddhism, from African Christians and from charismatic churches. We are returnees who feel scathed by past Christian church membership; we are returnees who are happily married to persons of other faiths or the same gender.

I am relieved to find that the church leaders are not trying to save us from hell and eternal damnation but are trying to save us from being Christians in exile from the church. We are looking for the Christian church that welcomes us along with the beliefs that forced us into exile. We are returning with doubts about the church and as people who believe doubts are an honorable state of spirituality.

Bass sums it up, “all were on a spiritual quest to do that which God called them to do–a mission that could only be accomplished in a community of diverse sorts. . . . a band of contemporary pilgrims on a quest to find home.”

She is right, so very right.

Reva Rasmussen, Deacon