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Coach John Wooden, who piloted the UCLA Bruin basketball team to so many championships, is 98 this year. He eats at the same restaurant every day, writes his deceased wife a letter every month on the date of their anniversary, and keeps in touch with his many friends and admirers. Wooden stopped driving last year, and has had some health problems, but since he had two more years before his license expired, he recently decided he would live to 100.

"The church is a human institution; its hierarchy is human. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so there is a great deal that is quite unsatisfactory about the church....Even so, I don't know an institution any better. In a cold-blooded sense...who else are you going to get to marry you, to name your child, and to bury you? And why do you want the church to do it?

So what does Easter mean for us, really? What hope does it give? What change does it make in our lives? I pondered this on Easter, as the death toll for our soldiers in Iraq passed 4,000 and our country entered the sixth year of war. I thought about it as I prayed for tangled families, met with hurting people, spent time with people who inhabit dark or dangerous corners of life.

It’s about at this time of year when we become disgusted with ourselves for not being able to maintain our New Years Resolution… again. It is so frustrating to continually go through the cycle of failure, hitting rock bottom, wallowing in it for a while, wondering if there is any hope for us to be something other than we are. We then get the courage to get back up and try to overcome ourselves, usually around New Years, only to slowly slide back down the slimy slope into the slop of our miserable lives. Well…that might be a bit of an exaggeration.

In February, I will serve as spiritual director for another group of Pastors as we journey to the Holy Land with Emmanuel’s pastoral renewal program. Twenty ministers and missionaries have been selected to participate in this year’s pilgrimage. The program focuses on renewal of calling, spiritual formation, and pilgrimage to Holy Land sites. We will visit sites in Galilee and Jerusalem, and devote their afternoons to guided retreat and renewal. Several area ministers will be on this journey including our own Katy Lines.

A beautiful gesture of peace, connection, and good will was recently sent from the world-wide Muslim community to church leaders around the globe. Over the past three years, 138 Muslim clerics, scholars, and leaders from many different countries have written and endorsed a document called "A Common Word," which reaches out to Christians with a hand of friendship and common understanding. Christians and Muslims comprise over half the world's population, making endless war a mindless dead-end.

Earth

I heard the Irishman on the radio say,

only it didn't sound the way we'd say it:

commonplace, like dirt under the nails.

He held it on his tongue, "Air-th,"

as if it were the best place, like heaven:

spacious, intricate, infinitely rich,

with swells of color and cloud,

forest stipple and patches of swale,

the "r" rolling along like the hills.

As if it were the best word in the language, better even than love.

       Jean Keskulla, in Christian Century, June 26, 2007

Prayer begins with the inhale.  Before we are able to utter anything with our lips we must first draw through them the air that fills us, enabling not only our speech but also our life.  And we must remember that humanity did not take the first breath but that it was given to us.  God’s exhale became humanity’s first inhale, filling us not only with life, but the ability to participate in the creative power of breathing.  For it was God’s breath that uttered the world into existence, and God’s breath that filled humanity with life.

And so before we gather words to give to our God, we must first realize that this activity of prayer is itself a gift from God.  It is the very breath that God breathed into humanity that we in turn direct back to God.  Taking in and breathing out this breath of God is no trifling matter. “This is not an enterprise to be entered into lightly,” Eugene Peterson notes. “When we pray we are using words that bring us into proximity with words that break cedars, shake the wilderness, make the oaks whirl, and strip forests bare (Ps. 29:5-9).”

    Where is your citizenship?  To what land do you belong?  It’s hard for most of us to imagine being citizens of any other country than the place of our birth.  We know the customs of our country; we all have a stake in seeing that our country is profitable and secure; we absorb the political opinions, habits, and preferences of our citizenry.
    Early Christians shook up their neighbors because they marched to the beat of a different drummer.  They refused to take their cues from the prevailing social culture of their neighbors.  The need to “fit in

I attended a candlelight vigil for peace tonight.  There weren't many
of us there.  Of those 25 who attended, perhaps half were Christians. 
I don't know what exactly made it a vigil...we weren't that vigilant
about anything...but I guess we did show up, met some people, signed up on a list, etc.  The woman who called us
together read a great piece by Garrison Keillor.  Allow me to reproduce parts of it...it was written in 2003...2003 for crying out loud.  Tell me what you think.
Garrison Keillor's Letter on the War

The opposition to this war is not about George Bush, or pacifism, or flabby
thinking by liberals, so much as it is a simple sense of dread at the thought
of the United States of America entering into a religious war against Islam.
The idea strikes Republicans and libertarians as well as Democrats, that our
crusade in Iraq may lead to a place we don't want to go, and that is the Fifty
Years War in which suicide bombers become a routine part of American life and
we are trapped inside a bad movie that doesn't end. A war that my grandsons
will dread as they grow old.