May 2024

The Bible: Still Under Construction?

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
A little over a decade ago, I was teaching a university-level course on “The Origins of Western Thought.” I do not remember what the exact assignment was, to which this particular student was responding, but I do remember how she began her paper. In it she wrote these opening words, “When God created the Bible…” I don’t remember what she wrote after this, because I got stuck on what I thought she might have meant. I wondered if the student, in speaking of the ‘creation’ of the Bible, was referencing the 1500-year period during which many humans were involved in the shaping of the Jewish and Christian spiritual writings that eventually were brought together as the diverse library known as the biblical “canon,” or if she was picturing a punctiliar event in which the Bible fell out of heaven in the form she knew it (most likely in English). I know I wrote a lengthy response to this student, explaining the aforementioned historical process, and I also know that that student never responded to me. Who knows, she may never have read my comments. 

Since then, I have taken it on as a sort of mission to inform students and congregations of the historical process by which the Bible was ‘created,’ not neglecting the arena of divine inspiration, certainly, but focusing on the amazingly rich history of the composition, editing, languaging, transcription, translation, dissemination, and canonization of what we, as people of faith, call “scripture.” 

Recently here at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church, which sponsors the Fran Park Center for Faith and Life, we have just completed a six-week class on the very subject of “How We Got the Bible.” [This video link gives a good overview of what we learned over six weeks.] I find many people are eager to learn about the origins of the Bible and how this library of writings, often treated as a monolith, coalesce in Christian tradition around core theological assertions of the ‘witnessing’ function of scripture to the one living Word of God who is Jesus Christ himself, who is attested by those very same scriptures. 

I have noticed that the part of the story of the Bible’s origins that interests me most is how the Bible has been moved from one language world to another again and again over two millennia. More simply said, I love to see how the Bible gets translated. In brief, the Hebrew scriptures (with a little bit in Aramaic) moved into Greek three centuries before the time of Jesus. Then out of that language world (known as the Septuagint) comes the spiritual vocabulary of the New Testament authors. In the centuries following the end of the Apostolic Age, the early Christian writings that become the canon, made their way quickly into other language worlds: Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Coptic (Egyptian), Gothic (Eastern Germanic), Slavonic, and then in the early Middle Ages into Anglo Saxon (Old English). 

All of these translations occur before the most notable Middle English (Wycliffe, 1380s) and Early Modern English (Tyndale, Coverdale, etc) translations of the 16th century, the latter of these having been inspired by Martin Luther’s monumental translation of the whole Bible (1522-1545) into common, everyday German.

And what was the point of all this translation work? To get the Bible into the hands and languages of every person, so that faith might come through reading and understanding. What’s often neglected in this story is the great resistance to this very phenomenon of the reading and understanding of scripture by everyday people, especially in the Late High Middle Ages and the Renaissance (...and we might even say…up to our own time.)

Earlier today, as I am writing this, I was reading the 1949 dystopian novel, 1984. George Orwell’s now classic tale follows the life of a man named Winston, who is caught (enslaved) in a highly-controlled society, where independent and creative thought are outlawed. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth, where he, along with others, rewrite history to conform to whatever Big Brother wants the people to believe. Part of this work of the control of information involves the creation of a new mode of speaking (a shrinking of the available words, thereby limiting thought), called Newspeak. One of Winston’s coworker’s explains to Winston, 

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.”

I was struck by how Orwell’s dystopian vision sounds presciently similar to our own time, but how it provides a distant mirror upon the times of great social upheaval in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, where the dominant church of Western Europe sought to control access not only to the scriptures themselves but also to how one was supposed to think about them. 

Every translation of scripture both limits and opens up meaning. Let’s take for example the movement of the word yeshua from Hebrew through Greek to Latin to English. This verb yeshua was used throughout the Old Testament to express God’s liberating actions on behalf of enslaved and oppressed Hebrews. In today’s English we could have a whole range of ways of translating this word: liberating, rescuing, freeing, delivering, and saving. The word-idea came into Greek as soteria which carried all these meanings with an added sense of a military victory over foreign, occupying forces, but also has intimate connections with a sense of “healing” and “restoring to wholeness.” 

When the scriptures were brought in the Latin-thinking world, the word was translated as salus, which carried again the dual sense of delivering and healing. The earliest English (Anglo-Saxon) translations used two word roots to convey this dual sense, both lys- and hael-, from which we get words like “loosing” and “healing.” The Anglo-Saxon Gospels even translate Jesus’ name instead of transliterating it. They called Jesus se Haeland (the Healer, the Savior), which is the root meaning of Jesus’ Hebrew/Aramaic name Yeshua. 

Today in our English Bible translations, we predominantly use the translation “salvation” to speak of God’s act of yeshua. Part of learning about how we got the Bible, and to honor the risky work of translating the Bible, so that we might have it available to us in our own language, done by such folks as John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, is to recognize that multiple translations are essential in our reading and understanding scripture. 

At the same university, about the same time as when I encountered the young woman who said, “When God created the Bible…”, I had another student come to me and opined, “Dr. Hegeman, you tell us that Bible words can have multiple translations and multiple meanings. My church tells me that I am only allowed to read the King James Version; it’s the only Bible translation that God has inspired for Christians to read. I feel like you’ve set me adrift in a little boat in a vast sea of possibility, and I’m lost.” I told her that I didn’t envy her that experience, but that I wouldn’t rescue her from it either. Part of our faith journey is to explore all the possibilities that the language of scripture opens us to, in faithful reading, in which our minds and imaginations are mutually engaged. 

So, when people ask me, “What Bible translation should I read?”, I tell them, “Read two or three! Or more!” Every act of translation is an act of interpretation (that seeks both to be faithful to original languages and to open up our capacity to experience these words in our own time), and every translation limits and expands our understanding and experience. Contrary to the limiting purpose of Orwell’s dystopian Newspeak, I encourage people to build faith vocabulary and discover a range of meaning for such key Christian terminology as “salvation.” “When you see this word, substitute words like liberation, deliverance, rescue, freedom, loosing, healing and wholeness. See how this expands your understanding and experience of scripture. Use multiple tools and commentaries. Seek out an amplified Bible. Talk with others around scripture, its language and meaning. And pray always that God’s Spirit lead us into truthful and compassionate knowing.”

Ultimately all words shall fail us, when we arrive at that ineffable moment when we shall see God face-to-face. Until that time, however, we “borrow” language to communicate in the thought-world of faith. The Bible becomes less something God has created to limit our experience; rather, we can come to experience the language of the Bible as something that creates us, as a languaged “house of Being” (as per Heidegger), in which “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). 

There is so much to learn about how the Bible came together than how it came to exist in more than 2000 languages around the world. Yet, the key part of the Bible’s creation is how it comes to be, generation after generation, culture by culture, in forms that bring people into the world of faith, through modes of linguistic expression that open up the realm of faith. Let us not be limited by one translation of scripture; rather, let us reason together around scripture to discern how God uses this particular mode of self-revelation to witness to God’s own greater purposes: the reconciliation of all creation unto Godself and our transformation as people made in God’s own image.

april 2024

Aging: The Biology of Senescence &
a Theology of Becoming a Senior

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
Having studied Latin over 40 years ago, I believe that I have forgotten more than I ever learned. I do, however, recognize immediately the roots of the English word senescence: senex (old), its comparative form senior (older), and the verb senescere (to grow old.) The Romans, among many other cultures, spent time philosophizing on growing older. We see this in the vocabulary they left us. Cicero [106-43 BCE] affirmed that, “There is assuredly nothing dearer to a man than wisdom, and though age takes away all else, it undoubtedly brings us that.” Perhaps Cicero is a little more optimistic than I; I can only hope that with age comes wisdom, but it is not necessarily true for all. Why else would we have such epithets as “You old fool”? Cicero though was not completely naive about aging; he also said, “As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age; first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands [us] not far from death.” (1) In two thousand years, not much has changed in our philosophizing on aging, even if scientific perspectives on aging have evolved.

In biology aging (or senescence), it is understood that, “Each multicellular organism, using energy from the sun, is able to develop and maintain its identity for only so long. Then deterioration prevails over synthesis, and the organism ages. Aging can be defined as the time-related deterioration of the physiological functions necessary for survival and fertility. The characteristics of aging—as distinguished from diseases of aging (such as cancer and heart disease)—affect all the individuals of a species.” (2) Biologically, we could say that after a time of maturation and fertility biological beings no longer serve a function. Mayflies live a very short time after producing offspring. The female lives another five minutes; the male lives two days.

Understanding human life cannot be limited to purely biological construals. Human beings can live long past fertility and inherent utility. Looking at the question of senescence from a theological standpoint enables us to delve into existential musings that have been ongoing for millennia. Where else to go to hear these musings than among some “elders”? (3)

Recently I sat with a group of senior men (in a Presbyterian church setting) and asked them what questions were on their minds with regard to aging. They responded with: “How do I stay relevant?” “Would anyone notice if I didn’t get out of bed today?” “Where was God in the midst of my spouse’s dementia?” “How can I continue to contribute to the community?” “Is it possible to find love and companionship now that I’m a widower?” “How do I overcome this sense of isolation I have?” “How do I deal with the grief that comes with loss of capacities I once took for granted?”

I also asked them what insights they had gained for this time of life. “There is always potential for new connections in life. Notice who’s new in the neighborhood and reach out.” “I’m thinking about God a lot more than I used to. When I was younger, I would go, go, go. Now I take things slower and appreciate the present more.” “I’ve lived alone for the last eight years, and you know what, I read the Bible in the morning and at night, I stay connected to my family by phone, and I ask God, ‘Help me to do something of value today.’” “My relationship with God now is one of gratitude. I used to ask God for things; now I mostly just say, ‘Thank you.’” 

One doctor in the group said that he’s learned to ask, “In what ways can I help prolong living and not prolong dying?” He also added a personal note: “I’ve found that at my age (of 96) a couple of ounces of alcohol a day makes life a lot more enjoyable.” 

Some of the men in the group, who’d had pastoral training, responded to the question of aging, saying, “Life for me used to be about agency and utility. Now it’s about the journey to oneness with God.” “A spirituality of aging must include a focus on wisdom, not purely on what knowledge we’ve gained, but about how God’s Holy Wisdom graces us with an integrated head and heart knowing.”

One pastor quoted from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in relation to Abraham’s trust in the promise from God that he and Sarah would have a son, “[Abraham] did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb.” For this pastor the passage signified that we can still have vitality at any point in life; how that vitality plays out may differ, but God still works through us and maintains a relationship with us. We still have capacity to grow. Every day brings choices in which we practice the spiritual gift of discernment.

The biblical author known as James pens these words, “You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that’.” [4:14] He sounds a lot like the author of Ecclesiastes, who reminds us, “For everything there is a season. All is vanity. Each drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.” But James gives greater dimension to this seeming hedonistic & nihilistic approach to life. 

What James focuses on is an interdependence that defines our existence here in the terrestrial plane. We are communitarian beings who find meaning in life together, with one another and with the Divine Person. I do wish that James had added, “Love and serve God all your days by loving and serving your neighbor…and when the time comes when this is not possible, allow others to serve you in love as fulfilling their calling.” This is what I heard from our gathering of elders: live in gratitude and embody that gratitude in service.” 

There is plenty more to talk about with regard to aging and developing a theology of senescence, especially in a world where we seek so many ways to cheat the aging process (4) and where issues of economic and social disparity means that we do not all experience aging in the same way. The Fran Park Center will be engaging in deeper conversations this coming fall and spring around these topics. And as communitarians, we would like to  know what’s on your mind, especially with regard to how communities of faith can help us all navigate the season of senescence, as we grow older and grow closer to God, day by day.

(1) "De Senectute (On Old Age)" by Marcus Tullius Cicero (Book 5, Section 15), 44 BC.
(2) https://tinyurl.com/v6s3sv6x
(3) The word Presbyterian has its root in the Greek word for “elder.”
(4) To learn more about the millionaire who is seeking to be “ageless” follow these links: https://tinyurl.com/mrywuaxf, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1CNcp8_Mk&t=399s

march 2024

Birthed into Faith

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
In the late 1990s, while I was still involved with my theological studies, I had the opportunity to visit England, to places such as Norwich, Cambridge, London, Salisbury, Bath, and Shaftesbury, each with their historic landmarks and grand cathedrals. I do not remember which church it was, but on one of the Sundays, the English were celebrating “Mothering Sunday.” I thought, “What an interesting way to refer to Mother’s Day.” I did not understand that, for the Church of England, Mothering Sunday refers to something quite different from our American commemoration of our maternal forebears.

You see, Mothering Sunday has a long history. Celebrated since the Middle Ages, it is a day honoring mother churches, the church where one was baptized and became "a child of the church.” Celebrating Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday of Lent, Christians have historically made a pilgrimage to the very church where they were welcomed into the Kingdom of God. Beginning in the early 1900s the emphasis shifted to honoring Mother Church, in general, 'mothers of earthly homes', Mary the Mother of Jesus, and even Mother Nature. Mothering Day has gained increasing popularity in secular British society as a response to the originally American Mother’s Day (also begun in the early 1900s), celebrating mothers and motherhood.

I am intrigued by this notion of thinking of one’s baptismal church as one’s ‘Mother Church.’ For me, if I were to make a trek to the place where I was baptized, I would find myself making a pilgrimage to the far north Midwest, to Grand Forks, North Dakota, to a little Methodist church in the downtown area. (It may not even exist anymore; I have done a search for it, to no avail.) I would have had no association with the place however, because I was baptized at three months old and our family left the area shortly afterward. My parents had only been there less than a year anyway, so I wouldn’t find people who knew my parents or even find records of long-lost relatives if I went today. 

There is a place, however, where I have felt a deeper sense of connection to baptism, and it wasn’t at the River Jordan in the Holy Land. It was actually in North Africa, amid ancient Roman ruins in central Tunisia. You see, in the first three centuries CE, Christianity had spread throughout the Greek and Roman colonies along the southern shores of the Mediterranean. By the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians existed in such numbers, and had imperial status, so that they were able to build churches, and even cathedrals, sometimes with elaborate baptismal fonts. In most of these places today, those cathedrals are gone, their walls plundered for other buildings, but the baptismal fonts (built into the floor) still exist. Some of these are decorated with intricate mosaics that portray ancient Christian symbols of baptism. 

On one of these baptismal fonts I could distinguish the name of elders (presbyters) and bishops (episkopoi) whom the church remembered as essential to their identity as a church. What I learned about these church leaders was that they had actually been martyred during times of Roman persecution, and had witnessed (from the Greek verb martyreo) to their faith in Jesus Christ, especially in death. Names like Cyprian and Aquinas leapt out of history to the present, testifying, “I have been baptized into Christ’s death, so that I might be raised in his resurrection.” I had not thought that these baptismal fonts were “womb-shaped,” (see picture above) but in a sense they are. They are more significantly highly symbolic of the second birth that Jesus spoke about to Nicodemus (in John’s Gospel), signifying that life in Christ means being born “again” and “from above” at the same time. Our baptism is symbolic of our being truly born, with Christ in his death, into a refreshed, restored, and renewed birth into his body, the church.  

In our baptism, we say that we join the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us in the faith. These saints (holy ones) are the church. It is out of their company that we are born. So, we could say that the church is our mother, when we acknowledge that out of the communion of saints and their faithful witness, we are birthed into faith. 

Standing next to those ancient baptismal fonts in Tunisia, I discovered the “CHURCH” as MOTHER. I said to myself, “This is where I was baptized.” And I could say this wherever people are baptized. Whether it is in St. Michael’s Orthodox Church in Kiev, or the baptistry next to the Florence cathedral, or in an Alabama river, on the chancel of Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in north Scottsdale. Every time the church gathers to baptize, we can say, “This is where I was baptized. This is where I was mothered in the faith.” Each place of baptism becomes a place of new birth and a place of pilgrimage, where we give thanks for those among the communion of saints who have “mothered” us along this faith journey. 

The month of March is coming to a close. In England, Mothering Sunday occurs often in March. Here in the US, we set aside this month as “Women’s History Month.” I encourage us all to consider and remember those women especially who have contributed to our faith and nourished our relationship to God through the church, whether they be pastors or Sunday School teachers, or seminary professors, or theologians, or mothers or grandmothers. Think back on times when women have led you to a deeper experience of God, and say a prayer of thanksgiving, proclaiming, “This is where I was baptized. This is where I was mothered in faith.”  Make a pilgrimage of the heart, mind, spirit, and body to such places of baptism, and give thanks to God for all the faithful love that has nourished and shaped who we are and who we have been birthed through the Spirit to be.

February 2024

Out of the House of Bondage

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
Black History Month began as “Negro History Week” in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, a noted African American historian, scholar, educator and publisher. It became a month-long celebration in 1976. The month of February was chosen to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Some 40 years before Woodson advocated for a week to remember the history of African Americans, a woman named Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert (1853-1889) sought to set down for posterity the lives of African Americans who had been enslaved. Albert, who had been born into slavery herself in Georgia, interviewed multiple people she met in Louisiana (where she and her husband, an ordained African Methodist Episcopal preacher, moved in 1879), but she focused primarily on conversations she had with Miss Charlotte Brooks, in her posthumously published book, The House of Bondage (1890).

Albert gives her reason for telling these stories. “Because American slavery was ‘the vilest that ever saw the sun,’ and it will remain forever impossible to adequately portray its unspeakable horrors, its heartbreaking sorrows, its fathomless miseries of hopeless grief, its intolerable shames, and its heaven-defying and outrageous brutalities…[nevertheless] there are some who presume that this slavery, ‘the vilest that ever saw the sun,’ has been, and is still, of divine appointment; in short, that from first to last it was a divine institution. It is well to remind all such people that the Almighty Ruler of the universe is not an accessory, either before or after the fact, to such crimes as were involved in slavery. Let no guilty man, let no descendant of such man, attempt to excuse the sin and shame of slave-holding on the ground of its providential character. The truth is that slavery is the product of human greed and lust and oppression, and not of God's ordering. Then it is well to write about slavery that the American people may know from what depths of disgrace and infamy they rose when, guided by the hand of God, they broke every yoke and let the oppressed go free.”

In the conversations Albert records we hear of how Charlotte had been enslaved in Virginia but had been sold away from her family when her “Marster” found himself in need of relieving some debts. Charlotte ended up in Louisiana, where she found that her new enslaver, much harsher than her previous, was a Catholic, like many Louisianans and not followers of the ‘Merican Religion (Protestantism). Despite this, Charlotte found a deep faith through the preaching, singing and Bible reading of a fellow Virginian, Miss Jane Lee, who ended up on a plantation two miles from where Charlotte was enslaved.

Charlotte speaks of how her enslaver suppressed religion on his plantation and would often put Charlotte in “jail” on Sundays with little food or water to keep her from meeting with others to sing hymns and hear from the Bible. Charlotte speaks of other cruelties she endured, the harshest of which were the losses of her children. Her enslaver’s son was the father of her multiple children, but none of these survived past the age of two. Charlotte was forced to leave her babies alone for hours on end as she worked in the field, only able to feed them on very short breaks. “I was glad the Lord took them, for I knowed they were better off with my blessed Jesus than with me.”

Through it all, Charlotte speaks, remarkably, of the faith she had in Jesus, which sustained her amid all the cruelties. She held onto hymns like “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land” and scriptures such as “'For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” When Albert asked Charlotte if she ever felt lonely, she replied, “No, my dear; how can a child of God feel lonesome? My heavenly Father took care of me in slave-time. He led me all the way along, and now he has set me free, and I am free both in soul and body.”

What is remarkable about these accounts that Albert records is that people so abused do not disavow faith altogether. Charlotte goes to great ends to break the rules, just to sing hymns and preach and hear scripture and to pray, even when it means facing “jail time” each and every time. What we gain from reading from such accounts is not the ongoing victimization of people once enslaved. Rather, we hear of people who take on the faith of their oppressors and find their freedom and consolation in it. We hear of the depth of trust, that God not only delivers but also sustains us all in the midst of the pervading trials in this life.

One of the most important theological tasks we are adjured to perform is to “remember.” Whether it is the deliverance of the Hebrews from bondage in Egypt or the last meal Jesus shared with his disciples, or the cross or the resurrection, we are called to remember. We spend time in February to remember the history that Black Americans themselves tell, in order that we may remember and not repeat the vilest sins of the past and that we may know from what depths of disgrace and infamy [we] rose when, guided by the hand of God, every yoke [was broken] and those oppressed [went] free.

I encourage you to read through The House of Bondage and see what story of faith you glean from it.

JANUARY 2024

Some Thoughts on the Park Center

written by Dr. Wes Avram
As I concluded my time as Director of the Fran Park Center for Faith and Life when I retired from my work as Pinnacle's Pastor on January 21, Kelly McGinn and Mike Hegeman (now Acting Director) kindly invited me to offer a few thoughts on our efforts for this January newsletter. I'm moved by the chance, because the work of the Center has been an important part of my time here, and an opportunity for which I'm enormously grateful. I'm confident that the work will continue, in new forms (for this has always been an experiment) and with creative leadership. 

We've put a stake deep into the ground, around which the Center has shaped many educational experiments. That stake is more like a wager, that high quality and carefully shaped adult education is a gift to the community and should be a unique part of Pinnacle's mission. This means that educational offerings should be interested in the world and strive to understand God's movement in the world. It also means that in light of rapid change in our culture, educational offerings should also be innovative, sophisticated, confident, and adaptable. With all of this in mind, we've developed programming around the Bible, Christian tradition, world-awareness, and dialogue across differences.  We've called those our four pillars. 

The word education means "to lead out" (into life), and that's just what we try to do.

We've had successes and we had challenges.  We've aimed high and kept the vision alive through a lot of change.  We carried it through changes in staffing, limited (though generous) resources, changes with our outside partners, programming cancelled or put on hold by the Pandemic, and some water treading that has come with the long notice I gave Pinnacle about my retirement. Though all of this, I think we've become a part of the DNA of Pinnacle Presbyterian Church, and I couldn't be more pleased by that. And I couldn't be more grateful to Dr. Michael Hegeman and Ms. Kelly McGinn, who've carried the work for nearly five years now. Let me add to that my thanks to other staff, including Dr. Allen Hilton and Ms. Crystal Anderson; to Rev. Erik Khoobyarian, whose interest in this work will carry it forward when he becomes Pinnacle's new Pastor; to teachers and supporters from the Valley as well as partners from seminaries and universities all around the country - especially Princeton Seminary; for foundations who have given grants; and for all of the lay leaders who've given insight along the way, enthusiastically participated, and gave financial support. I remember all the way back to when we called it The Pinnacle Theological Center, inspired by the vision of Rev. Fran Park. It's been a run, and the run continues!

So what have we learned?  Well, here are just a few thoughts:

• We've learned that folks who are deeply engaged with the world around them, who are thoughtfully educated and eager to learn, and who desire to understand connections between faith and life, respond enthusiastically to Christian education that isn't "dumbed down." By that I mean education that's well conceived and well delivered, and that brings them into a larger conversation. I've loved how responsive you've all been, and have been humbled by that.

• We've learned that education is, indeed, mission - not just inward-looking. Society is hungry to understand what difference faith can make in the world, without cliche. Our long-running "Faith and Science Roundtable" is just one example, among others, of how we've learned this.   

• We've learned that experiential education can connect our minds, our hearts, and our hands in deep and beautiful ways. Our unusual approach to pilgrimages has proven this idea, as has bringing students studying for ministry into conversation with our members right here in Scottsdale. 

• We've learned that the congregation and the community are fertile ground for theological education, bring the educational work of the church home in ways that are sometimes difficult in purely academic settings. Church and community are good places to learn, too.      

• We've learned that dialogue across differences, in ways only possible in the church, might be one of the most important gifts we can offer today. It's become a central part of what the Park Center is all about. 

In their book, For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference, Miroslav Volf and Matthew Croasmun, one the Director and the other the Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School, sum up the reason we do what we do.  I think what they say is pretty good, so I wanted to share it.  They write:  

Theological education comes in many forms—from elementary Sunday school and confirmation classes to courses offered in Christian secondary schools and colleges to seminary training in all its varieties to the doctoral and postdoctoral educations of academic theologians.  As we see it, a common aim unites these forms of theological education. Theological education is a dimension of Christian education, and it therefore shares in its goal: forming human beings according the pattern of Christ, such that each person and community is able to improvise the way of Christ in the flow of time in anticipation of becoming, along with the entire creation, the home of God. (8-9, italics mine)

Improvising the way of Christ in the flow of time, so that our learning can become a form of worship, and so our worship might be welcoming to all people, and so our welcome might embody Christ's love, and so Christ's love might find a home in the world.  This inspires the work of the Park Center, and it will continue to do just that. And it's inspired me.  I've been honored to be a part of it. 

Your support will keep the work going.  It will enable innovation, exploration, and outreach.  Please keep it up!  To that end, I'm humbled to repeat here what was announced to the congregation on January 21, that as I retire from congregational ministry a generous gift from the Stingley Family Fund has laid the foundation at Pinnacle for the Avram Family Fund for Education in Social Transformation.  That fund will support programming through the Park Center in response to "Christ's call to racial reconciliation, global justice, peacemaking and the love of enemies."  You can read more about this elsewhere in this newsletter.  I couldn't be more pleased, humbled, and honored by this fund and its purpose.  I hope that others will contribute to it along the way, to support what the Park Center will do in response to this call.  Similar support for other Park Center emphases will assure a great future for this important mission.  

It's been fun. It'll stay fun. And God will find a home in the work.  

Thank you for letting me be a part of it for these years.  

Peace, and good learning, to you all.     

december 2023

What Place Nativity?

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
It is December, and for many of the world’s Christians, Christmas is much on our minds. Ministers are busily preparing for Christmas Eve messages that reflect both the solemnity and the joy of the occasion, as the greater society is busily engaged in holiday events that mark the turning of the year with family traditions of gathering and gift giving. Amid the rites of remembrance of Christ’s birth that we embody in December is the knowledge that at some point in the year (on which day we do not know) God came to live among us in human form. We speak of the one in theological terms as “Emmanuel,” God with us. We call this one’s earthly name, Jesus of Nazareth, but even this earthly name has theological import. Jesus (or Yehoshua, or Yeshua) bears a name that means, “God is our salvation, deliverance, emancipation, rescue, liberation, and healing.” That’s quite a heavy load to bear for the one with such a name, especially for an infant, born in a humble place, in Bethlehem.

What we’re talking about is nativity. At this point in history, among Christians, the celebration of Christmas, as the remembrance of Jesus’ birth, seems all pervasive. But, not all Christians historically have celebrated Christmas. We see evidence of this in the earliest church. The Apostle Paul, whose writings make up the earliest written records of the Christian movement, seems completely unaware of the stories of Jesus’ birth. At one point (in his letter to the Galatians), Paul says of Jesus, “He was born of a woman, born under the Law.” And that’s it. There’s no flourish or embellishment in this. Paul merely emphasizes that Jesus was human and part of the greater Jewish family. In other places, (such as in Philippians), Paul speaks a bit more cosmically about Jesus’ coming into the world, a bit like the opening of the Gospel of John (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and was God and became flesh). Paul says that though Jesus was in the form of God, he did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped and exploited; he emptied himself and was found in human likeness, becoming a slave to all humanity. Nativity doesn’t play much of a part in Paul’s theology in a practical, human sense. It is the ending of Jesus’ life (on the cross) that plays the larger role in Paul's understanding of God’s purpose in Jesus, enacting salvation, liberation, and restoration for the whole cosmos. All this would not have happened unless Jesus had been born, but Paul seems to assume the birth, while never focusing on it.

Some Christian traditions serve as a counterpoint to Paul. These Christian look to the events leading up to and including Jesus’ birth as the key “moment of salvation.” There is an old Russian communion hymn, based on Psalm 74:12 that goes: Salvation is created, in the midst of the earth, O God, O our God. Alleluia. This hymn is often sung at Christmas, because it points to nativity as the quintessential moment where heaven and earth touch, and in so doing, the entire earthly cosmos experiences God’s created salvation. This is reminiscent of Genesis 1, where God speaks light into being. With Jesus’ birth, salvation itself is born among us as the Light spoken into Being. (There is a Latin Christmas hymn O Nata Lux that speaks of Christ as “birthed light.”)

All this theologizing about nativity can become a bit philosophical and abstract, and the event that brought God near, could serve to alienate people from God’s very presence if it’s approached so abstractly. Francis of Assisi figured this out 800 years ago. In 1223, Francis set up the first nativity scene (as the tradition goes), depicting (in 3D form) the intimacy and earthiness of the birth of Jesus. Francis was the one who put all the elements of the biblical story together with some enduring traditions, and used this scene not only as a teaching tool, but also as a place of hospitality, welcome, and worship.

Jesus was born into a highly politically charged situation. Within two years of his birth (according to Matthew’s Gospel), all the male children in and around Bethlehem were slaughtered by a king who wanted to maintain his sole grip on power. The nativity of Jesus tells us that Jesus, who was like a king, equal only to God, “did not consider equality with God as something to be grasped or exploited,” but emptied himself. Nativity scenes are important symbols that tell us this very thing, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,” that the world might have life and light through him.

This year Bethlehem is in a dire situation, with its inhabitants living within the sphere of war. There will be no public celebrations to mark Jesus’ birth, only solemn remembrances for communities of faith. Nativity still remains important in our time. The stories and the creches remind us all that God chose to live among, to create salvation in our midst, and to give us hope that God can still redeem, reconcile and restore…even when the world is in the midst of tribulation. One church in Bethlehem has chosen to make its nativity display atop a pile of rubble, comprised of bricks from dwellings broken by bombs and air strikes.  Nativity reminds us that God chose such a place to be born. Nativity means that divinity is enfleshed love.  

Along with people of faith throughout the globe this Christmas we can pray for God’s peace to erupt once more, saying, "Lord Jesus, be born in me. Make my life and my heart your Bethlehem. Take my future and lead me to the places you want me to go and to the people you want me to touch. Lord Jesus, be born in me!"[i]

[i] Phil Ware. https://www.heartlight.org/articles/201712/20171212_beborninme.html

november 2023

The Welcome of Outsiders: Philoxenia

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
There is a story of Jesus that occurs in roughly the same telling in both the Gospels of Mark (7:24-30) and Matthew (15:21-28), in which a foreign woman approaches Jesus and begs him to heal her daughter (tormented by a demon). This woman has no name. We call her either the Canaanite Woman or the Syrophoenician Woman, depending on which gospel account we read.  What we do know about her identity is that “Canaanite” and “Syrophoenician” are markers that place her outside the pale of Jesus’ Jewish world. Her identity as Canaanite places her in the camp of those people who in ancient time were seen as the enemies of the Hebrew people, as they entered the land from exile in Egypt. Her identity as Syrophoenician marks her as well as a resident within political boundaries set up by successive generations of conquerors and colonizers: Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, and the list goes on. The tone that the Gospel writers take is that she is definitely an outsider and, as Jesus seems to say, “not welcome at the table.”

Despite Jesus’ rebuff, the woman shows tenacity and daring, “I may not be welcome at the table, but I’ll certainly come in afterwards and take the crumbs that are left. I am that desperate.” Matthew’s Jesus interprets her boldness as faith (trust, belief) and tells her that her daughter is “made well.” Mark’s Jesus just says, “For speaking as you have, you may go. Your daughter is well.” In the past, theologians have focused on this woman’s humility and faith. In recent years, however, biblical interpreters have focused on the way this woman challenges social, political, and religious norms, and says to Jesus, “I belong at the table.” It is her courage to insert herself within the bounds of Jesus’ “Kingdom of God” that causes that very kingdom to expand. Not solely within the boundary markers of “Israel/Judah,” but into the world of the Gentiles (Hebrew: Goyim) goes the Way of following Jesus.

At the heart of this story is the image of a table, one at which those who were once not entirely welcomed are able to sit with those who were invited guests. This boundary-crossing gospel movement of welcome is echoed throughout scripture, especially as the Jewish followers of Jesus find the ‘good news’ proclamation of God’s reconciling love made flesh in Jesus the Messiah spreading to all those called “other”: Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians and beyond. And omnipresent to this expanding table welcome is friction, tension, and conflict. Human beings do not like change. We see this in the Apostle Paul’s account of what happened in the Galatian churches. Some followers of Jesus from a Jewish background were highly uncomfortable about “sitting at table” with those followers of Jesus from a Gentile background. Paul comes right out and says, “If we cannot all sit at table together and share fellowship, then Christ died for nothing.” (Galatians 2:21)

The gospel hope of a “global table” in which all are welcome seems quite tenuous these days. (And I wonder if this dream has ever been embodied in this world, where social, political, economic, racial, and religious differences haven’t created friction, tension, conflict and even violence, blocking table fellowship and the reconciliation that can flow from such.) Even if hope of a “global table” seems tenuous, we look for signs of hope in the world where human beings, inspired by faith and courage, create hospitality and sustenance, crossing political, social, religious boundaries, to create change.

One such group is the World Central Kitchen, whose mission is “to immediately serve chef-prepared meals to communities impacted by natural disasters and during humanitarian crises.” In the last month WCK has served over a million meals to Israelis and Palestinians alike, and in the midst of crisis and violence, individuals have risked their lives to create a table at which people can come, receive sustenance, and live another day. (Read more about WCK’s work via link below.)

The image of a global table is central to Christian faith. We as Christians recall God’s saving and reconciling love in Jesus Christ, every time we gather for communion. We as Presbyterians say, “All are welcome at this feast of God’s love.” Not all Christian communities welcome all to their eucharistic gatherings, but I do believe it is our calling to hold to a theological grounding for common hospitality. In this month, here in the United States, as we prepare to gather at “Thanksgiving” tables, we are called to ponder these scriptural words, even as we give thanks to God, remembering those whom God would include at our tables:

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal; be ardent in spirit; serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; pursue hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Romans 12:9-14

Nestled within this passage is one key word: hospitality. The Greek here is philoxenia, which means, “love of outsiders.”

What would it mean if we gave the nameless Syrophoenician woman the name, Xenia? When we see Xenia come to Jesus’ table and say, “I too belong at the table,” and we watch how the gospel embodied in Jesus brings a transformation, so that the table itself expands, we witness Xenia get a new name: Philoxenia. (phil- means “love.”) At Jesus’ table the outsider becomes beloved. This kind of transforming gospel love is much needed in our world today. Faith, hope, and love grow as we practice godly hospitality, whereby God brings “healing” of all that is demonic in this world. May our Thanksgivings this year be genuine embodiments of such transforming love, that we see the world changed.

October 2023

On Refugees

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
When my mother was still in college, she spent one summer helping to staff a summer camp in the Adirondacks (in Upstate New York). The year was 1955, ten years after the end of WWII. That summer, many of the children at camp came up from New York City, their parents sending them for a “fresh air” experience. A little over a year ago, in one of my mother’s photo albums, I saw a picture of her with about 20 children at this camp, ranging in age from 8 to 15. I asked my mother about the picture, and she said, “Oh, all of those kids were Jewish, most of them holocaust survivors or their younger siblings.” I turned the picture over, and all the names of these young people were on the back. “Whatever happened to these kids, Mom?” “I don’t really know. I never heard from any of them again after that summer.”  “I wonder if we could do a Google search and track some of them down?” I said. And that’s what I did. I was only able to find one of them, due to the unusual spelling of his last name, Mindelzun, the Yiddish equivalent of Mendelssohn.  What I found out online was that this Mindelzun was a retired Stanford professor of radiology and was still alive, AND, I found his email address!

I contacted Dr. Mindelzun on my mother’s behalf and got the two of them corresponding with each other. At one point, I too joined them and asked him if I could learn more about his life. He said that he had written his memoir, The Marrow of Memory. I immediately ordered the book online and raced through it as soon as I got it. What unfolded was the story of one family, Polish Jews, who became refugees, fleeing war and the threat of annihilation on multiple fronts. Just a couple of weeks after Robert Mindelzun was born in Warsaw, the Germans began their Blitzkrieg invasion of Poland. His parents, fearing for their lives and his, fled eastward into Russia, abandoning everything and everyone they knew. Treated as “enemy non-combatants” by the Russians, they were sent to live and work in a labor camp above the Arctic Circle. Robert recounts in his memoir, time and time again how they should not have survived these years of war, deprivation, and genocide. Escaping the Russians, they fled to Ukraine, which was then invaded by the Germans. The youngest years of his life were spent fleeing, seeking shelter and safety. Even when the war was over, when Robert’s family was able to return to Poland, they found that anti-Jewishness was more rampant among Poles than before the war. They fled again, this time to France. Life was not much better in a devastated, post-war Paris for them, and so, eventually they immigrated to the US, settling in New York City. A year later, when Robert was 16, he went to a camp in Upstate New York. That’s where the book ends. We don’t learn how this young, Polish Jewish refugee became a Stanford University doctor. Even though his story is one of success (his son goes to become a successful novelist, many other refugees to do not fare so well).

As of the end of 2022 the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) report that the number of people forcibly displaced topped 108 million with over 35 million of these people being considered “refugees.”

With regard to the United states, the UNHCR acknowledges: The US resettlement program is the largest in the world, and the U.S. has been the global leader in resettling refugees since the 1970s. Refugee resettlement to the U.S. is traditionally offered to the most vulnerable refugee cases including women and children at risk, women heads of households, the elderly, survivors of violence and torture and those with acute medical needs. The US resettled 29,000 refugees in 2022, double that of the previous year. [That’s only .08% of the number of refugees worldwide.]

The numbers of refugees are staggering, and I can only imagine that there will be many more refugees in the coming months (with over 30 major wars/conflicts going on). And, behind each number is a human being with a story. If only each and every refugee was able to write such a book as Robert Mindelzun has. Why? It’s through such personal records that one can relate with greater empathy to the people who flee their homelands and seek refuge and safety in places in which they may feel completely foreign in relation to language, culture, religion and values. Behind every statistic is the story of a family, a community, a people torn apart by war, deprivation, and violence. We could learn about the challenges refugees face in new settings: prejudice, fear, trauma, and isolation.

“The foreigners residing among you must be treated as native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” Leviticus 19:34

The Hebrew scriptures call us to consider the lives of foreigners, strangers, and refugees and treat them as “native born.” One organization that seeks to do this very thing is the “Welcome to America Project” in Tempe, AZ. Their mission is to welcome refugees as new friends, helping them to integrate to a brighter future. It all began after the Manning family lost their brother on 9/11. They focused their grief and provided a warm welcome to a recently arrived Afghan refugee family and then another. Twenty years later, we have welcomed over 15,000 refugees from over 40 countries who are just like you and me, the only difference being that they cannot return to their home country. They had to flee their country with little to no personal items, and we felt it was our calling to welcome them with some basic household items. We rely on the community to donate gently-used items such as computers, TVs, bikes, furniture, and appliances. We build basic kits for household cleaning, hygiene and office and school supplies. We are so touched when it comes full circle and refugees we have welcomed come back and welcome the newest refugees. The core of what we do is letting newly arrived refugees know that they are welcome and we are happy they are here.

With all this help, refugees still find it difficult to be accepted in their host communities. Throughout my life, my mother and father set the example for me of working with refugees of all kinds: those from Vietnam, Central America, and the Marshall Islands. I’ve carried on this work with teaching refugees and immigrants English skills. When individuals and organizations can build relationships with refugees, there is great potential for us all to grow. We can enrich our community life doing the work God calls us to in helping “the least of these” and welcoming the stranger, learning that behind every statistic is a human being with a story of courage and hope, loss and recovery.

Check out the Welcome to America Project at https://www.wtap.org/.

Book Reviews from the Jensen Girls

This month we are focusing on refugees and asylum seekers. It seemed only fitting to share a few book reviews from two Pinnacle kids and what they learned while reading two books about refugees.

Refugee by Alan Gratz (Scholastic, 2017, 352 pages)
A book report by Lia Jensen (11, 5th grade)

I read the book Refugee by Alan Gratz. The story is about three different children who live in different times and places. The first child, Josef is a Jewish boy who lives in Germany during the Holocaust. The Nazis force his family to leave the country. The second child, Mahmoud, is a Syrian boy who lived during the recent Syrian civil war. He tries to keep his head down, but trouble finds his way when his family is forced to leave after his house is bombed. The third child, Isabel, is a Cuban girl who lives during the oppressive government of Fidel Castro. She is facing food shortages while her mother is very pregnant. Although these three live in different times and places, they all have something in common: they are all refugees, having been forced to leave their home country to survive. Something else they hold in common is that they all lose someone special to them. 

Before I read this book, I thought that a refugee was just someone who crossed a bridge into a new country and had a little trouble once they got there, but it all worked out in the end. After I read this book, I learned that most of the time it’s really hard for refugees just to leave their country. Once they do, it’s hard to travel to a different country, really hard to get into that country, and really, really hard to learn how to fit in. 

I would like other people to read this book because it teaches us how to be compassionate to people who need somewhere safe to live. Imagine being forced to travel up to 5,000 miles and then being treated like an outcast just because you weren’t born in the same place or speak the same language. By thinking about refugees in this way, we can:
o   Make refugees feel welcome by inviting them to church or dinner
o   Understand that refugees go through a lot for their families
o   Learn how to help refugees trying to live in the U.S. by helping them to learn English 

Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna by Alda P. Dobbs (Sourcebooks, 2022, 288 pages)
Review written by Zadie Jensen (11, 5th grade)

Barefoot Dreams of Petra Luna is a powerful book based on a true story about a family escaping Mexico during the Mexican Revolution in 1913. Twelve-year-old Petra is tasked with caring for her family, Amelia, Luisito, and Abuelita because her mother died and her father was removed from their home and forced to serve for the "Federales."

While reading the book, I learned most about the main character, Petra who shows courage and hope in the way that she protects and loves her family. Even in the middle of a war, Petra holds onto her dream that she will one day learn to read. Her Abuelita calls learning to read a "barefoot dream" because it won’t go anywhere, but Petra holds out hope. Later, Petra uses this same hope to give her the courage it takes to leave the town and the people she loves and journey to the United States. The family keeps hope throughout their seemingly impossible journey out of Mexico thanks to many kind people who help them along the way. These people become a part of her bigger family while she's caring for her immediate family.

This book taught me more about the real world, and how not everyone gets the luxury of living in a house with food and water. It also occurs to me how awful it would be living in worry that someone might attack you or having a little girl or boy who is just trying to have a normal life, but is always concerned about what might happen next. I think it's important to learn about people whose lives are different from mine, especially refugees so that I can understand that they are really no different from me other than the fact that they are not safe in their country. When I read about kids like Petra, it reminds me that I need to love and care for everyone. I never know when I might be in a difficult situation, and I would hope someone would help me.

September 2023

Why Listen to Theologians?

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
Why listen to theologians? Well, that all depends on who’s asking the question and who the asker thinks a theologian is and what a theologian does. Let’s say the person asking has nothing to do with religion whatsoever. The question seems almost absurd, “Why would I ever listen to a theologian? A theologian is no different from a fantasy writer. ‘God talk’ has no purpose outside the walls of a church or other religious institution. There’s no reason for the wider society to listen to a theologian.”

But what if the asker is a part of the Christian tradition, situated between the church, the world, and the academy (institutes of higher learning), and is asking the church to consider listening to theologians? Well, that’s where we are. I am asking you to listen to theologians, at least to consider doing so.

Ok. Great. Who are these theologians I want you to consider listening to? Well, let’s start here. At the level of definition, via Mr. Webster, a theologian is ‘a person who engages in or is an expert in theology.’ If we break down the word “theology” we get “words (logos) about God (theos).” This is a gross oversimplification, but a place to start. I encourage anyone who reads the Bible to ask of each and every passage, “Who is God?” in light of this particular passage. One may then ask, “Who are human beings in light of this picture of God,” and “What is the relationship implied here between God and us human beings?” 

If we read Genesis chapter 1, we may discover that God is the one who creates, human beings are the ones created in God’s image, and the relationship between God and humanity must be inferred from our being “made in God’s likeness.” We as readers and interpreters of biblical texts, are doing theology at each and every point of this endeavor: in relation to the text, we seek to discern and name who God is, what God does, and how we as human beings are to live in relation to who God is. Since we are created in God’s image, are we to create as God creates? Are we to hold ourselves and others responsible for our divinity? Are we to figure out what happened to that divinity, as we seek to answer questions like, “Why do people do such horrible things?”

As soon as anyone of us tries to name God, as we read scripture, we are set on the journey of doing theology. Are we then theologians? I would say, yes, at the very basic level. And yet, there is a whole discipline of doing this theological work that has become specialized as an ecclesiastical-academic endeavor. The Christian church has invested a lot of energy and authority in the localizing of the work of ‘theology’ in a few, sanctioned experts who think deeply and critically about teachings we might glean from scripture that are not only profitable but prescriptive for Christian thought and communal life and practice. Whether these “sanctioned theologians” are designated as authoritative by the magisterium (as with Roman Catholics) or seminaries (as with many Protestants), at best theologians help to guide Christian communities so that they are not “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:14).

One problem we face engaging these theological thinkers is that they seem to speak in a rarefied language, meant only for insiders trained in philosophy, rhetoric, ethics, sociology, economics, critical theory, and a whole host of other disciplines. And this is not a modern problem. Christian theology has from its very inception sought to understand scripture, the nature of God, what it means to be human in God’s eyes through philosophical lenses. Even contemporary theologians are sometimes categorized as either Neo-Aristotelian or Neo-Platonist, Plato and Aristotle, both Greek philosophers, having lived hundreds of years before Jesus himself! We ourselves need to learn some of this vocabulary and the disciplines from which they come to be able to track along with theologians.

I have just randomly opened a book by Miroslav Volf (a Yale Divinity School theologian), and I found this paragraph:

As theologians through the centuries have known – from Dionysius the Areopagite to Teresa of Ávila, from Karl Barth and Karl Rahner to James Cone – prayer opens the eyes of the heart (Eph 1:18). Its posture of desire, adoration, and surrender disposes theologians rightly toward that of which they struggle to speak, yielding ecstatic and proleptic complexion to their articulations as the illumination of a skylight floods a whole room. For the Life of the Whole Word: Theology that Makes a Difference, 133.

If you were able to comprehend this paragraph on a first reading, I commend you. Some of these terms I have to look up and then think hard about what Volf is trying to convey. I have a hunch, though, that I may agree with Volf here; it just takes a little longer to get there.

Listening to theologians requires us to spend time with the flow of their thought. I find the same with poetry, the secrets of which are only revealed over time. The most important thing about poetry is that I am changed in the process of reading and experiencing the poet’s crafted and nuanced language. So too, with theologians. Each has a perspective, something to reveal, about the nature of God and what it means to be humans in community in light of who God is.

At their best, theologians serve a prophetic role. They can stand at the intersection of church, world and eternity, and bring a “word” that shapes our thinking and doing, even speaking a word that enables us to experience God.

To engage theologians, start with “popular” theological writers, such as Diana Butler Bass, James Marin or Rob Bell, those who endeavor to speak in everyday terms. Move on, when you’re ready, to “intermediate” theologians, those who write in seminary or divinity school settings, or oversee larger church bodies, and are still accessible, such as Walter Brueggemann, NT Wright or Rita Nakashima Brock. And if you find your theological hunger unsalted, tackle historic figures such as Augustine of Hippo, Hildegard von Bingen, Soren Kierkegard, Karl Barth, or Paul Tillich. The list is inexhaustible.

As and when you listen to theologians, see what ways these thinkers can help you experience the God “who was and is and is to come” and to live more faithfully this life with which God has gifted us. 

August 2023

Learning to Teach; Teaching to Learn

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
In Arizona, August is “Back to School” month. Students of all ages head back to the classroom, and it’s a time when educators recommit to their calling to join these learners on the journey of intellectual development, hoping to be model leaders…and in some way, make a difference...for learners. I have great empathy for everyone who enters a classroom, whether as a learner or teacher. The work is monumental, and I would hope that there is a lot of grace for those who would learn and those who would teach.

I remember sitting in my high-school Latin class, having the teacher explain, “The word education ultimately comes from educere, putting together the preposition ex-, meaning "out," and the verb ducere, meaning "to lead.” It is the role of us educators to lead your students out of the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge and wisdom.” My Latin teacher was a former priest, and he often spoke in such vaulted terms. Even though the image was a bit pretentious, it made a strong enough impression on me, and I have never forgotten it. Little did I know then that I would spend my life as one of those illuminating educators.

My first teaching experiences began at 14, when I would help corral toddlers in the preschool Sunday School class at my church around learning experiences designed for the youngest learners. Apparently, this got me hooked on being a teacher. When I was in college, I was planning to study linguistics and do research on language acquisition. But, I auditioned for the choral professor in the hopes that I’d have an outlet in the choir, and he said, “What are you doing in linguistics? You can study all the languages you want in music. You should be a music student, and if you want to earn a living, I strongly suggest you become a music educator.” Well, that was it. I became a music teacher. What I found in my college studies though was that I loved whatever I got to teach: English classes, history or music. It mattered not. If I was interested in the subject, I just loved teaching it.

Out of college, I ended up teaching at a little Presbyterian Academy in downtown Phoenix. I taught: fourth-grade reading, music, drama, 2nd-grade & 5th-grade classroom, Spanish, cooking, and Bible. After only four years, I headed off to seminary, and after two years of studies, I was back to teaching, this time it was fellow Master’s of Divinity students. My first teaching at Princeton Seminary was in the Speech Department, and later I taught courses in liturgy and preaching. I loved it. Before I had left for seminary, I had told my presbytery Commission on Preparation for Ministry, “God will weave ministry, teaching and music together somehow throughout my life”; on this I was clear, and God did. I just didn’t realize how much the “teaching” part would come to the fore.

I stayed teaching at Princeton Seminary for 10 years, and again, I discovered I loved it. I felt most alive teaching. I loved most seeing people grow in their sense of calling and in their competency in leading worship. I even got “loaned out” to a couple of other seminaries along the way to teach for a semester or two. I got to meet amazing people, many of whom I am still connected to today.

When I left seminary, (after earning a “doctorate”; and remember that “doctor” is Latin for “teacher”), I knew that I would continue teaching, somehow, someway. I came back to Arizona and tutored in Latin, Greek and Hebrew…often teaching one student at a time. I taught courses at Grand Canyon University, everything from Music Appreciation to Developmental Writing Skills, from History of Western Thought and Culture to Christian Worldview, weaving together all my passions. And I continued to love teaching.

When I first taught an Adult-Ed class at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church, I encountered people who were interested in marrying their love of learning with their desire to grow in faith. And here I have stayed. I get to teach on the Bible, on Faith, and on a diverse set of topics from “Christmas in Ethiopia” to “the Spread of Christianity throughout Asia,” from “Angels in the Bible,” to “The Development of the English Bible.”

Although an educator technically is someone who leads others from ignorance to knowledge, I believe that being a teacher is an ongoing journey from darkness to light. My students lead me in discovery and inspire me to be my truest self.

It is Christ, the Wisdom of God, who truly leads us into knowledge of self, knowledge of faith, and knowledge of the God who calls us from darkness to light. It is Christ who is the doctor of the soul, the one who teaches us unto righteousness and makes us disciples of love.

In this “Back to School” season, look for ways to be a life-long learner, and teach the good you know.

Faith and Back To School

written by our Park Center Graphic Designer, Suzanne Mitchell
Going back to school has always been a time full of all the “feels” in our household. Yet having two middle-school kids and one preschooler, I’m navigating two very different sides of the spectrum when it comes to going back to school. My two older children, Jacob (13) and Audrey (11) are overjoyed to get back to school, see all their friends, and their “normal” routine. But as we left “Meet the Teacher” this year, my daughter’s excitement quickly dissipated as she realized none of her close friends were in her classes. After years of building those friendships, she felt overwhelmed with the idea that she would have to make “new friends.” Of course, she would see her old friends a little throughout the day but most of the day she felt like she was going to be all “alone.” 

As a 6th grader, this was very intimidating to her. As a parent, this filled me with worry about how her first week of school was going to go, and every day after for that matter. However, as a person of faith, I took comfort in knowing that God is with me and my children every single day. Audrey finished her first week of school and although she was sad and missing her friends, she did exactly what I told her to do, which was to be kind to others and open-minded to new friendships. And I’m happy to report she has made a few new friends already! But when she comes home after a not-so-stellar day, we talk about it and pray. I remind her that she is not alone in her journey. Encouraging your children to pray for themselves, their teachers, and their classmates does wonders for their mindset.

While middle-schoolers are seasoned students and many have no problem going back to school, preschoolers can be much less excited to walk through the school doors. Enter my youngest, Noah (4). He went to preschool last year but only 2 days a week. This year, he was in the big time, going to school 5 days a week! It was going to be a big transition for the both of us! Last year it took Noah quite a while to become comfortable going to school, every time a school day rolled around, it was a struggle getting him out the door. I constantly worried about how his day was going and if he was making any friends. This year those feelings rushed over me ten-fold, knowing he would be in a new class with a new teacher and possibly all new kids. But again, I prayed about these worries. And I reached out to my close friends and asked them to pray about them as well. Ultimately, I had to remind myself that starting preschool is a natural part of my child's development, I have prepared him to the best of my ability, and I need to trust in my faith and in my child's abilities to navigate this new chapter in his life. And you know what, I picked him up that first day, and he was all smiles. He had a great day and had one friend he knew from last year in his class. And by the fourth day, he was coming home telling me all about his day and naming not one but 4 other friends! 

Back-to-school season is just one part of my children's journey. As a parent, I can continue to support and encourage my children throughout the school year, knowing that God is with them every step of the way. And with faith and perseverance, they can overcome any challenges they may face AND achieve their goals.

July 2023

Summer Travel

written by Dr. Mike Hegeman
In the summer of 1318 an Italian Franciscan friar by the name of Odoric of Pordenone set out on a journey that would take him around the known world, through the Ottoman Empire, Persia, India, China, the Philippines, Borneo and Sumatra. Odoric would not return to his native Friuli (in northeastern Italy) until early in 1330. He chronicled his twelve years on the road in a travelog that was published during his lifetime, bringing him much fame, probably a little more fame than a humble friar could stand. Odoric tells of wonders beyond belief, cities that were 100 miles across and full of human-animal hybrids and demons disguised as women far more beautiful than any earthly female should be! 

I have only read a little about this 14th-century adventurer, but his journeys remind me of my own travels, journeys which shaped my sense of belonging to a world far-bigger, more wondrous, and more diverse than I could have ever imagined. 

I grew up (for five years) as a child on a tiny coral island in the South Pacific, and though the setting was exotic, most of the people I encountered were Americans. This was the US military outpost known as Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands. Although the setting is a lot like Florida (palm trees and beaches), what was unusual were the downed Japanese planes in the jungle and deserted and crumbling WWII bunkers overgrown with vines. Together with the sunken ships in the harbor, like the German cruiser Prinz Eugen, which had survived multiple battles and even nuclear test bombing, the exotic elements of my upbringing set me on a path of discovery throughout my life.  

When I was twenty years old, I had the opportunity to teach English in far Western China. Little did I know then that I would retrace in part the trek that Odoric of Pordenone had made seven centuries before. Out in the Taklamakan Desert I interacted with Uyghus and Kazakhs along the Silk Road, exploring ancient, abandoned cities, Buddhist caves, 13th-century mosques, and exotic oases, with markets filled with dates, nuts, and hami melons. At one point I found myself in a dance competition with a Uyghur Turk, who’d picked me out of a crowd to see if I could mimic all his moves. After the culmination of the dance, the two of us spinning like ecstatic dervishes, the crowd, erupting in applause, could not decide who had won. The next day in the market, people gestured toward me and said in Turkish, “That’s the guy who danced with Shah Qassim last night,” and they all shook my hand, smiling and slapping me on the back. Friar Odoric would have met these peoples’ ancestors long ago, moving along the Silk Road as Marco Polo had done a generation before him. I have had a deep fondness for Turkic culture and people ever since that summer of ‘87 spent in Xinjiang (Old Turkistan). My heart goes out to those same Uyghurs today who face the suppression of their very living, seeking to hang on to any semblance of their centuries-old ways of life. 

Six years ago, in the summer of 2017, I passed through the Philippines, spending a couple of weeks among the Cebuano-speaking people of Mindanao. Even though the Spanish had colonized the Philippines in the 16th century, giving the country the name of their Iberian monarch, the Franciscan Odoric had spent time there two centuries before his Jesuit counterparts. What I discovered in the Philippines was a people who were genuinely the happiest and most hospitable people I’d ever met. Even though life was quite difficult for them, they held a positive disposition, surrounding themselves with good friends, close family, and delicious foods. (And they never missed an opportunity to sing karaoke!) Have you ever eaten avocado with sugar sprinkled over it? No, me neither. But I had it there! Now I must admit that I didn’t eat the in-shell, boiled, fetal duck…and it’s hard to imagine some day doing so. When I found out that there was a community of people who still speak a form of Spanish in a town not too far from Cagayan de Oro, I asked if I could go there. The answer was a quick and sharp, “No!” Apparently, the area was too dangerous. My hosts feared I would be kidnapped and held for ransom. And just two weeks after I left, there was a violent insurgency from that town into a neighboring town, and many people were killed. Summer travel is not without its travails. One picture from that trip that remains with me comes from when we were rafting down the Cagayan River, and along the banks naked children, from jungle-dwelling tribes, played in the trees, jumping into the water and waving at us as we passed by. I am struck to think that there are people living in much the same manner as when Odoric had passed by there 700 years ago. 

In the summer of 1998 I found myself in rural France at a monastic community called “Taizé.” The week I was there over 5000 people had gathered from around the world to sing and pray. The whole group of pilgrims is divided up into prayer groups, and I chose to sit in on one which was French speaking. In that group I met an Italian couple, who by the end of the week invited me to their home. And since I didn’t speak Italian, nor they English, I waited a few years to accept their offer, so I could learn to communicate with them. In the summer of 2001, I traveled with a few friends to Florence to enjoy a week in the countryside. After that week, I made my way on my own up to the northeastern part of Italy, to a province called Friuli-Venezia Giulia, or Friuli, for short. This was an ancient Roman province, and still today there are many exquisite Roman sites, with historic churches filled with 3rd-and-4th-century mosaics. Little did I know that I was in Ordoric’s home territory, a land made up of a composite people of Roman, Lombard, Frankish, and Slavic ancestry. In the thousand years before Odoric’s birth, this area had changed hands so many times that the language even today is a mish-mash of these successive conquerors’ tongues. When I finally got to my friends’ home, I couldn’t understand why I had such difficulty understanding them. I had spent those intervening years since Taizé learning to speak Italian. After a couple of days, my friends’ college-age daughter said to me in English, surreptitiously during dinner, “I am sorry that my parents do not speak Italian very well.” What?! “What language do they speak?” “Friuliano,” she replied. And I felt a little funny having studied Italian in order to communicate with these lovely people, yet the language of their hearth and home was a hybrid dialect that embodied the history of epic migrations and changing dominions. I could only laugh. Now I had something new to learn! I cherish the time spent among the major sites in Friuli: Udine, Cividale, Aquileia, and Trieste, a city with strong Hapsburg lineage, looking more like the schlosses of aristocratic Austrian burgs than Mediterranean villas. My summer travels had brought me into other worlds, exotic at first, and familiar after sharing a few good, home-cooked meals and lots of local wine (one just takes empty wine bottles down to the market and fills them up again like filling up water bottles!). While I was there, my friends’ daughter, Irene, arranged for us all to attend a concert, in an ancient Roman amphitheater, of a popular Italian rock band, I Nomadi. At one point, the lead singer of the band made an announcement (in Italian), “This next song goes out to Michael, from America, the ultimate vagabondo! May your journey be blessed.” The lyrics of this song, Il vagabondo, go something like this, “I am a wanderer (vagabond), with the wind on my skin and the light of stars on my body. I am a wanderer, who knows not where his home is. I don’t have any money in my pocket, but I have God left in it.”

Odoric of Perdonone returned from his journeys a changed man. But he returned…with God still in his pocket…and in his soul, I would imagine. I am intrigued to find such a figure as Odoric, and though our journeys are separated by centuries, there are parallels of discovery. My summer travels have brought me into encounter with exotic peoples who at the end of the day are as human as I. Each and every journey has changed me, because God has met me in a thousand faces. 

May your travels, wherever they take you, bring you closer to the God who meets us along the way.

Pinnacle Kids Go To Israel

This month we are focusing on Summer Travel. Since three Pinnacle kids just got back from traveling around Israel, we thought it would be fun to ask them some questions about their trip!

It's so exciting that you and your family got to go to Israel!  What did you do to prepare for the trip?

• We cleaned, packed, and watched shows about Israel. We reread passages in the Bible that we knew we would visit: Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’s baptism, when Peter raises Tabitha, and when Peter dreams about clean and unclean animals together and Jonah of course.

Once you arrived in Tel Aviv, what was your first reaction to being in the Holy Land?

• We were super tired and it was the Jewish Sabbath, so most of the city was closed. We went to the beach and thought it was a very beautiful place. In our opinion Tel Aviv didn’t feel very holy, it felt more like a big city.

The food is different in Israel, what foods were new to you?  What did you enjoy most?

• Lamb was new to us and at one place they served us a whole fish, eyes and all. We also had a pita called sabich which has fried eggplant and hard boiled eggs. It wasn’t our favorite, but it was definitely different and our parents liked it a lot.
  Lia - My favorite foods were falafel and the pita wraps with lamb and veal kebabs—especially at a place called Jasmino in Tel Aviv.
  Gwendolyn - I liked the lamb and Gelato at a place called Otello.
  Zadie - I liked the chicken shawarma platters with hummus, tahini, and Lebanese pickles because I can choose how to mix it myself instead of the chefs putting it all in a pita for me. The best was a place called Hakosem, and we bought the cookbook so we can try making it ourselves. 

It's a special experience to visit places you read about in the Bible, what places did you go to? Tell us about your favorite memories.

• We went to Jaffa, Bethlehem, Old Jerusalem, Nazareth, Capernaum, Tabgha, Jordan River, Masada, Ein Gedi, Dead Sea, and of course Tel Aviv. Every single place had a really cool history and we actually got to see the places where Jesus could have been. But they also had interesting cultural histories that weren’t necessarily tied to the Bible. Gwendolyn - Masada was the best because it was a dry heat like our desert, really pretty, and has interesting stories. Lia - Ein Gedi was my favorite because we got to play in waterfalls. It was also where David wrote a lot of Psalms and I can see why.
  Zadie - My favorite was the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem because it was really pretty and seemed more likely to be were Jesus was crucified than the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre.

Of all the new things you learned in Israel, what stands out the most?

• Gwendolyn - Masada because the story of how desperate the Jewish Rebels were to avoid being slaves to the Romans that they would rather die than be slaves again.
  Zadie - The Military because I thought it was very interesting how there was military all over the place, and when we were going back into Jerusalem from Bethlehem there was a soldier who got on our bus and checked passports. They carried really big guns that were scary.
  Lia - I found it most interesting that parts of Israel have been destroyed and rebuilt many times to make artificial hills. Instead of leveling the land they just buried the old city and call the hill (which is a city on top of a city) a Tel. This is how Tel Aviv got its name. 

Now that you're back from your trip, what will you tell your friends about your trip?

• Zadie - We learned a lot, packed a whole lot into 7 days, and came back ready for a really good shower.
  Gwendolyn - It was very cool. I visited the lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea stings, and I bathed in mud.
  Lia - I climbed up a waterfall. I’ve been to the place where they think Jesus was crucified and buried. It made the stories I read in the Bible seem even more real because I got to see where they actually happened.

june 2023

Cookbooks

written by: Dr. Wes Avram
There's an essayist whose writings I've enjoyed named Will Hoyt.  In one of his essays he writes about how he learned to read.  Nothing there about how old he was when he learned the alphabet.  Nothing about "Bob Books" or other series used to teach kindergarteners.  Nothing about techniques at all.  Instead, he writes about hiking.  He says that it wasn't until he learned how to really hike—how to pace himself, what to look for, conserving energy and expending attention, looking up and looking down, appreciating the direction of sunlight and the flow of a day's heat on the climb, anticipating inclines and flatter lines, experiencing the same hill in different ways on different days—that he learned how to move through a book.  It was after becoming an experienced hiker, he said, that he learned how to relate to an author too.  So by this account, it wasn't until he was an adult that he learned how to read. 

I like to hike when I can, but I'm no hiker like Will Hoyt is.  But I get what he's saying.  I understand, intuitively, that reading—at least as it's been understood in Western culture until recently—is about more than processing information inscribed in words, sentences, and paragraphs.  But it took me a long time to learn that, too.  And I had to learn it in my own way.  Reading is a work, a relationship, an adventure, a discipline, and a gift.  And it's also an environment, in its way.  

I think my first glimmer of all of this came from growing up in a house full of books.  My father enjoyed reading and always had a book or two in the briefcase he took to work.  But my mother was the lover of books.  At any used books sale she could find she'd buy all kinds and sorts of them.  And she read most of them.  When I was a toddler she bought a metal hanging system and unfinished wooden boards (which she carefully sanded and stained) so she could install shelves in our little living room wall.  I watched her.  She took down and put up those same shelves in every house she lived in from then on--for six decades and five houses.  And more were added, room by room.  Bookshelves became images of access to a larger world.  

I suppose a screen can work like those shelves, but it's different.  Maybe there's a trace of that difference in how I decide whether to buy a digital book for my iPad or a physical book for my own shelves.  I tend to make the decision by how I think I'm going to relate to what's inside. It's not perfect, but that's pretty much how I do it.  If I think my relationship to the words will be instrumental, meaning there's some information I need that I'll simply process and use, I'll buy a digitized copy.  It's so much more convenient.  However, if I think I might savor something, read and reread parts of it, argue with an author or consider her ideas in way that's different than just processing words, I'll likely buy a physical book.  I'll hold it in my hand.  I'll catch my breath a bit before I decide whether I'm going to write in it or not.  I'll put it on a shelf alongside other books (not just thumbnails of title pages on a screen).  But I might be a fossil in this.  I doubt my children make the same distinction—at least not yet.  

Yet I still think there's something to a physical book, even if there are some advantages to screens.  Words on a page and words on a screen just aren't the same things, and the way we approach the information within them is different—even if they influence each other.  Not better or worse.  Just different.

When my family recently faced the inevitable challenge of deciding what to do with my mother's massive library, we ended up filling six medium sized Home Depot packing boxes with just cookbooks.  Just cookbooks—and my mother, to be honest, didn't really cook!  I mean, she made meals—and sometimes quite carefully.  But she didn't cook in the way Will Hoyt hikes, or the way she read.  Yet she still had all those cookbooks.  I wondered why.  I was tempted to think it wasteful.  I chuckled and thought how quaint (and burdensome) those boxes feel in time when all I need to do to get a recipe for an Ethiopian dessert is go to Google or search the New York Times cooking section online.  Cookbooks are passe, I figured.  I don't want any of them.  And so we packed them up, commiserating about why she had so many in the first place.  

After a while, though, I began to realize that these cookbooks weren't shelved in her kitchen to be used—even if a few of them were used now and then.  They were there as windows, thoughts, connections, blurred lines between place and adventure.  They were living reminders that her experience of life is not the only experience of life.  And they were symbols of possibility.  To see the spine of glossy pictured volume that reads Soups of the Orient next to a paperback Heart Healthy Lunches is a kind of invitation to a hike, I guess: what to pack and what to look for.  Maybe one of the volumes would get pulled off the shelf on a lark, for a looksee, or inspire an experiment the next time some friends came by.  Maybe the old, stained and breaking Betty Crocker in the same line of vision as Keto Forever helped keep the present moment in perspective—and gave depth to time.*  Maybe all those cookbooks were more alive for her than I thought when I'd chuckle over them on visits.  We read our shelves as much as we read the books on them.  

Maybe all of this is why I'll look up a passage of scripture on my iPad or iPhone if I need it quickly for some reason, but I'll never read scripture from a screen when I'm leading worship.  I hold a bound bible in my hand, to remind worshippers that the passage I'm reading is part of a diverse library of revelation.  And maybe all of this is why every once in a while I'll start a book and actually finish it—when for a reason that still has some mystery in it, it becomes something more than a source of information I can pick up and put down.  When it becomes a conversation partner.  

Maybe hiking is how we learn to do it.  Or perusing and sightseeing.  Or conversation.  Or discipline. Or study.  Or worship.  

Take up and read.

* I made up those titles (except for the Betty Crocker), as the boxes have been donated to the local public library, but I think you get the point. 

Summer Reading

written by: Dr. Mike Hegeman
I can clearly remember the books that, in the summer of 1978, when I was 11 years old, turned me into a reader. Sure, I had read books before that time, kids’ books, like Charlotte’s Web or The Cricket in Times Square, but for some reason, looking back, I don’t think I was ‘avid’ in my engagement with books. In the summer of 1978, that changed when our family moved across country from suburban Boston to rural, southern Arizona, traversing 12 or so states, in a motor home, stopping at every ‘point of interest’ along the way. Before we left Massachusetts, someone from our church had given our family the box set of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. [That same box set is sitting right next to me as I write this 45 years later.]  And that box set was one thing that did not get boxed up and shipped to Arizona. It went with us, four kids, two parents, a German shepherd, and Narnia.

As I recollect, I had read the fifth book in the series, The Horse and His Boy, sometime during my sixth-grade year. I remember finding it on the shelf in our Hillside Elementary School library, in a section marked “Notable Reading,” or something of that nature. I read it to fulfill the school-set goal of reading a certain number of books over the school year, dutifully writing a book report, retelling the adventure of the boy Raj and his talking horse. Since the goal was reading 25 books that year, I don’t recall thinking too much of the book at the time, although I still have tucked away in the deep recessing of my mind the dramatic and tense horseback chase scenes and exotic Middle-Easter feel. I doubt that I would have read the other six books in the series, if it hadn’t been that, on our westward trek across country, these books became a prized commodity. 

As I remember, at least two of my sisters started reading the series as we began our journey to Arizona. Not to be left out, I joined them, having to wait to read each one until the other siblings completed each book, for they had to be read in order! The wait often was excruciating. I remember one day that we were staying at a KOA campground. One sister snuck off with one of the books, out of her turn, and spent five or six hours in the ladies’ restroom, hidden away from us, trying to get ahead, without any interference. Even though there was contention among us about getting to read the books, it was still a shared activity. We’d talk about Aslan and the Penvensie children and the grand adventures they were all on in the parallel world of Narnia, and how we wished we too could enter into another world through an old, forgotten wardrobe. We were completely engrossed. Heartbreaking was the final ending of the final book: the ending of all things. Long before I knew the word “apocalyptic” (nor wrote a dissertation that used that word hundreds of times), I felt the apocalypse in my flesh and bones, my whole being, because C.S. Lewis, the atheist turned Christian apologist, wove it into a seemingly childish book series about children and the magic of childhood.

The Chronicles of Narnia turned me into a reader, but what was it exactly that shifted me from a “read books to fulfill a school requirement” to a “read for pleasure” to a “read because I am a reader and that is simply what readers must do” kind of person? It must be that with The Chronicles of Narnia I first dove in the “deep magic” of story. Many years later, in graduate school, I would learn about homo narrans. As opposed to conceiving primarily as homo sapiens (wise/thinking humans), Walter Fischer proposed that we are story-telling and story-living beings. We shape our reality through story. We interpret the deeply intuitive experience of a grand cosmos through the medium of story. Our consciousness is shaped by the stories we tell. We weave experience into story, and the stories we tell in turn make us who we are and tell us how and why we act as we do.

I do not think I read the Narnia series again for another 28 years. In that interim period, I learned that the “not so tame” lion of the series, symbolically represented the Christ of faith and that each of the adventures that Lucy, Peter, Edmund and Susan undertook were in some sense allegories of the life, trials and tribulations of faith. I learned through my travels in Turkey that “Aslan” is a word of Persian origin that simply means “lion.” I also read many other of Lewis’ writings, including, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Problems of Pain, A Grief Remembered, and his Space Trilogy. [Anytime now I hear Dvorak’s New World Symphony, I am transported to the world of Perelandra which retells the story of Genesis on a nearby planet, because during the summer of 1980 when I was reading the book, I had the symphony on LP playing over and over again for hours as I was absorbed again in Lewis’ story-weaving endeavors.) I could put Lewis’ Narnia series into context after reading much of his corpus, and by the summer of my 39th year I had spent 13 years involved in graduate theological education. 

In August of 2006, I began a trek across the US, moving from Princeton, NJ, to Phoenix, AZ, in a migratory pattern very similar to what our family had taken those 28 years before. And what did I read along the way? Well, I guess I should ask, “What did I listen to along the way?” because this time I was doing the driving, solo, with only a CD player to keep me company. As a graduation present for completing doctoral work in preaching, my oldest sister had bought me the full set of The Chronicles of Narnia in audio form. These books again journeyed by my side across, not having been packed up and shipped out ahead of me. It was as if I were captaining the Dawn Treader, traversing the exotic terrestrial seas of the great Midwest, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, North & South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, arriving 18 days later in Phoenix. All along the way, I lived in the land of Narnia, along with the Penvensies and their companions, through a myriad pages of woven tales, and I wept. I wept openly and thoroughly when Aslan was sacrificed on the Stone Table. I wept when Susan was no longer able to return to the land beyond the wardrobe. I wept when all things came to an end. I wept because Aslan was so loving as to offer grace to stubborn, unbelieving dwarves. I wept like a child, despite the 13 years of theological studies that could explain all the Christian allegory and allusion. I wept because I was once again taken up into the story…and my own world made greater sense in light of the imagination of an Oxford professor who could tell a set of stories to children and for children, that those of us of another age could easily overhear and by which be transformed in the process.  

I cherish my summer reading, for through it my human identity was broadened beyond not only homo sapiens or homo narrans, but to homo legens as well. In light of this, I could pretty easily, if playfully, amend the Cartesian dictum cogito ergo sum to lego ergo sum…“I read; therefore I am.” Who will you become through reading this summer?

April 2023

Princeton Theological Seminary Reflections

written by: Henry Burt, PhD student | Practical Theology
On Monday, January 16, a splendid reunion took place on the corner of Happy Valley and Pima.

The touring choir of Princeton Theological Seminary, under the leadership of choir director, Dr. Martin Tel, and New Testament Professor Dr. Eric Barreto, reconnected with PPC after three long years that witnessed a global pandemic, the murders of George Floyd and Asian Americans in Atlanta, and the war in Ukraine. I write this as a participant in this year's touring choir, having heard only wonderful things about its first immersion with PPC in January 2020. 

Thinking back three years ago, I was then a full fall removed from Princeton Theological Seminary, having graduated in 2019 with my Masters of Divinity. I was doing my "Lutheran Year" of a congregational vicarage in Baltimore that would lead into ordination. I was anxiously awaiting responses from PhD programs in Pastoral Theology. It was a lonely time, and as I scrolled through Facebook in those early days of 2020, seeing old seminary friends who were posting daily about their warm, sunny time in Scottsdale with the touring choir, I wondered if I had just come off of my life's peak.

Little did I know Piestewa Peak would grace me three years later.

Dr. Tel approached me about being the "student-chaperone" of sorts for the touring choir back in fall of 2022. I am fortunate to call him both mentor and friend, having sung in the seminary choir all six of my years here. (As fortune would have it, I came back to Princeton in the fall of 2020 for said PhD. I am just now starting my dissertation writing as I write this reflection!) I have been serving a bilingual Lutheran congregation in the Jersey City area, and the class/tour emphasis on singing and composing bilingual liturgies for Holy Week was, perhaps, something I could speak to.

Yet, I feel that the whole week with PPC and my colleagues were ones in which I was spoken to—indeed, so many new and familiar faces alike spoke to me. That first Monday, after a delicious Mediterranean dinner that PTS alum and dear friend Pastor Erik Khoobyarian (class of 2018) made for the two choirs, we joined forces to celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a powerful night of songs, poems, and reflections. Before coming to PPC, I thought Dr. Tel was unrivaled in his ability to stir up energy in the room for evening choir rehearsals and concerts. And then I met Dr. Ilona Kubiaczyk-Adler....

Wednesday brought us back to PPC for a Mexican dinner followed by a stellar lecture by Dr. Baretto for the whole congregation. He wove together the Luke-Acts texts with an emphasis on a radically inclusive reading of them. Speaking as an observer, I am still struck by Dr. Barreto's discussion about Zacchaeus. Oftentimes, this wee little man gets bashed for being a stingy tax collector. It is as if Jesus finally reforms him so that he will now give half of his possessions to the poor. However, Dr. Barreto wonders if Zacchaeus has already been doing this charity all of the while? Some biblical translations follow: "Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.”

All to say, what if we took a Christ-like stance of giving others—and by "others," I especially mean those we are most inclined to scrutinize, condemn, and mistrust—the benefit of the doubt about their own Christ-likeness of faith, hope, and love (charity)? What if our first stance towards others was actually to seek out and bless the good in them, rather than to first audit them for any bad parts, which we often further hold them and condemn them to?

Moving on, Thursday was the momentous Piestewa Peak hike. Dr. Mike Hegeman gave us an expert's guide to the flora, fauna, and history of the land. He also talked about his extraordinary educational and vocational career, which I am still catching my breath after hearing. How fortunate PPC is to have leadership like Dr. Hegeman, with such educational, musical, and artistic talents! (Side note—I got to see your Grand Canyon Universltiy 'Lopes in Denver for the first and second rounds of March Madness just last week!)

Next to the MLK Jr. Concert, Friday's immersion with Dr. Ilona and the Sing for Life choir was perhaps the most moving part of the week for me. How wonderful it was to see the Image of God in each and every one of us—young, old, those with dementia, and those with more silent, less apparent, hidden, or unrecognizable vulnerabilities and limitations. If there is one thing that my fellow choir members took out of this trip, it is that the Sing for Joy ministry will be an exciting and pivotal part of our own ministries in years to come. 

That afternoon, after a PPC lunch panel with Pastor Erik, Pastor Leah, Dr. Ilona, Dr. Hegeman. and Brandon H. about their experiences in ministry (and more particularly at PPC), Pastor Leah and Dr. Hegeman took us to the Fort McDowell Reservation to learn about its rich history, including its Presbyterian rootedness. After sharing in song with its leadership in the sanctuary, we ventured to the fellowship hall for an exquisite meal of tamales and beef stew.

Saturday followed up on the previous afternoon's immersion with a visit to the Heard Museum. Wow. My IQ probably grew at least ten points. And my appreciation for the indigeneity of this region and of this nation at large increased beyond quantifiability. We went to the Desert Botanical Gardens in the afternoon, after which Dr. Tel and I made a quick venture to Hole in the Rock. It was a precious time of reflection on the past week, which the splendor of God's geographical beauty further allowed us to do.

Sunday was the conclusion of our trip (at least, for most of us). Dr. Barreto gave a terrific sermon for PPC in both the early service in the chapel and the later service in the main sanctuary. A brunch panel featuring seminarians allowed us to answer questions about everything from what we foresee as regards the "future" of the church, personal formation experiences in seminary, and even our sense of call that first led us to pursue ministry. Most packed up their bags to go to the airport aftwerward, but I had another afternoon with Dr. Hegeman and Pastor Erik to see Dr. Ilona's organ concert at Arizona State University! Dr. Hegeman then drove me around some iconic sanctuaries in Phoenix (including Frank Lloyd Wright's First Christian Church) before I was treated to a pizza dinner with his family. After a great night sleep at his apartment—adorned with his own quilts and portraits that make me wonder how he seems to carry out a 100% work/100% life balance—it was back to the Garden State for me.

I especially want to thank Kelly McGinn—who encouraged me to write this reflection—for welcoming the choir at Spirit in the Desert Retreat Center when we arrived that first Saturday. You put on a great reception where we all got to meet Ilona, Mike, Erik, Leah, and Wes. I want to thank Dr. Wes Avram for giving us the grand tour of the PPC campus that Monday of MLK, Jr. Day. The choir was sorry to have missed you as the week progressed when you needed to attend to family matters. Finally, I want to thank Chuck and Mary Goldthwaite for hosting me and two other seminarians for two nights in your home. Chuck and Mary, if you are reading this, know that those are the best ribs I will have ever had, and your sherbet was to die for (even for that seminarian with a peach allergy...hahaha). May we all meet one another soon enough!!!

march 2023

Holy Humans: A Recap

The Fran Park Center is currently hosting a series of lectures on Holy Humans, inviting staff and local theologians to lead us in a series of discussions on exemplary figures in church history, both ancient and modern, to see what we might learn from the lives and works of those who have gone on before us. We began our anthropological tour with a look at St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), a French Catholic bishop  during the tumultuous times of the Reformation, who became a noted champion of the Counter-Reformation, fighting to win the new Protestants back to the Catholic faith. What is remarkable about Francis de Sales was his unfaltering commitment to douceur (gentleness), at a time when violent and protracted conflicts between Protestant and Catholic Christians marred the European continent. Our presenter, Dr. Tom Donlan, teacher at Brophy College Preparatory High School, went so far as to say, “De Sales should not have been canonized for winning 60,000 lost souls back to the Catholic faith; rather, that he promoted a spirit of tolerance and unity, when few could see the humanity of the opposing side.”

The Apostle Paul tells the new Christians in Philippi, “Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near.” (Phil. 4:5), which in French is “Que votre douceur soit connue de tous les hommes. Le Seigneur est proche.” I had never heard of Francis de Sales before this the first of our six lectures on Holy Humans, but I was intrigued that this 17th-century figure held so closely to gentleness. So, I did a little reading. What I heard from de Sales' own words was, “The Church is feathered with an outstanding mixture of spoken and written ideas. Love is distributed as a layer of fine gold over all the teachings and doctrines. This gilding gives a unique sheen. All of it belongs to love. The Church functions in love, for love, and by love…to live God’s way is to love.” (Treatise on the Love of God.)

What does it mean to be a holy human? In the case of Francis de Sales, it is to live in loving response to God’s love, even when the whole world speaks against tolerance, unity and gentleness.

Our second speaker, Dr. Elizabeth Ursic, introduced us to three “holy” women: Mary Magdalene (1st century), Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), and Anne Hepburn (1925 – 2016). What Dr. Ursic wanted us to walk away with was the idea that women throughout the ages have challenged the church to see them as full participants in the ministries of Christ’s body. Mary of Magdala, delivered by Jesus of “seven demons,” followed after him and supported his work, standing by him even through his crucifixion. After Jesus’ rising from death, Mary was the first evangelist of the resurrection. A thousand years later, when Christianity had a full hold of Western Europe, the nobly born Hildegard defied many cultural expectations, by using her rare education to write treatises on medicine and botany and married life, as well as books of her visions and musical compositions. She was so revered that the Pope at the time granted her permission to preach! Anne Hepburn, a Scottish missionary, born a little over 800 years after Hildegard, questioned the male-dominated authority of the Church of Scotland by advocating not only for social justice but also that the church recognize the “motherhood of God.” What makes these women “holy”? Out of their faith, they embodied the call of the gospel that says, “In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all are one.” The words “wholeness” and “holiness” come from a common root. They are holy who seek the wholeness of the church, in that all who seek to serve may find their place.

Our third session of Holy Humans will be led by Dr. Michael Hegeman, as he exposes us to “Scandalous Saints” and the ways they served the kingdom of God through being a scandal (Greek skandalos meaning “stumbling block”), challenging rigid social, political, gender, legal, and theological norms to reveal the fuller sense of what it means to be holy, made in the image of the One who is Holy.

Each of these lectures will be available in podcast form in the weeks to come. We encourage you to look for these podcasts on the Fran Park Center website: https://franparkcenter.org/out-of-the-park-podcast.  

FEbruary 2023

Love Your Enemies

written by: Martin Luther King Jr.
Jesus’ words can’t be dismissed as an exaggeration. So how exactly should we follow them?
You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:43-45

Certainly these are great words, words lifted to cosmic proportions. And over the centuries, many persons have argued that this is an extremely difficult command. Many would go so far as to say that it just isn’t possible to move out into the actual practice of this glorious command. They would go on to say that this is just additional proof that Jesus was an impractical idealist who never quite came down to earth. So the arguments abound. But far from being an impractical idealist, Jesus has become the practical realist. The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.

Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.…

Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls “the image of God,” you begin to love him in spite of – no matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never slough off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.

Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system….

The first reason that we should love our enemies, and I think this was at the very center of Jesus’ thinking, is this: that hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere somebody must have a little sense, and that’s the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. And that is the tragedy of hate, that it doesn’t cut it off. It only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. Somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love….

There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case…. So, Jesus says love, because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated.

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, “Love your enemies.” Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love, they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So, love your enemies.

Source: From a sermon, November 17, 1957, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama. Excerpted from Following the Call, reprinted from A Knock At Midnight, ed. Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1998), 37-57, by arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor New York, NY. Copyright © 1963 by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Renewed © 1991 by Coretta Scott King.

January 2023

Living with Simplicity, Integrity, and Commitment:
the Evangelical Life

written by: Dr. Michael Hegeman
One of the most promising and troubling passages in scripture appears in the fourth chapter of Acts and tells us of life in the early church:

32 Now the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed any possessions as his or her own, but everything they owned was held in common. 33 With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. 34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. 35 They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

What’s promising about this text is that the believers were “of one heart and soul.” I don’t know if I’ve ever truly seen this kind of unity and harmony in the church (certainly not in the world), but I’ve caught glimpses of it. In every church I’ve been a part of I have witnessed instances of genuine community and compassionate service. Although this passage from Acts doesn’t use the word “love” to describe the relationship among the members of the early church, love is implied. Every state of being and every action mentioned in this description of the early church flows out of the love these disciples had for God, for Jesus, and for one another. It’s beautiful to imagine such oneness…and it seems so unattainable.

How idealistic of these first-century church folks to think they could sustain living as “one heart and soul,” sharing everything in common! We’ve probably all heard of some utopian society or another that burned so brightly and furiously…and fizzled just as quickly as it sprang up. We hear about this kind of ‘fall from grace’ in the very next chapter of Acts (5), when two church members, Ananias and Sapphira, sold some of their land and gave only a portion of their proceeds to the church to be distributed to the needy and poor. What they did wrong was that they lied and said they had given all the proceeds. Even though the congregation shared all in common, and all had their needs provided, these two members still lived with a sense of lack, driven by fear most likely. They didn’t trust that their needs would be met through the community, and so they acted selfishly, hoarding when it was in their best interest to have shared.

What’s troubling about this text is not that Ananias and Sapphira acted as they did. What’s troubling is that it’s too easy to see ourselves in their actions. The perception of lack underlays much of human thinking and acting. I would wager that much of human conflict is spurred on by our sense that someone has more than we do, and we’re living in deprivation.

Jesus once praised a woman who gave two copper pennies to the temple treasury collection, because she gave all that she had. The question that arises for me is, “What kind of support system did that woman have that she could give all that she had. Did she have a son or daughter she could go home to? Did she have a bed to sleep in somewhere? Was she giving all that was left of her social security check that month, knowing there’d be more next month?” It just doesn’t seem prudent that she would give away all that she had. What was her plan for the next day? On the other hand, it seems prudent that Ananias and Sapphira retained something of what they gained in the sale of their land. “Put a little away for a rainy day,” is a prudent way of living.

Some members of the early church took it to be a very serious devotion to give in such a way so that “there was not a needy one among them.” Over time the church codified this way of living by giving all as “the evangelical counsels” of poverty, chastity and obedience. What does this mean? Well, Jesus counseled his followers, not demanding of them, that they live simply, with great integrity and commitment. To what? To the proclamation of the gospel. That’s what “evangelical” means: the proclamation of the good news of God’s rectifying act in the cross of Jesus Christ. And that’s what we learn in our passage above from Acts, that the believers were of one heart and soul, sharing their belongings, so that the apostles could devote their energies to the proclamation of the good news of Jesus’ resurrection.

These “evangelical counsels” were not necessary for “salvation”; rather, following Jesus with simplicity, integrity and commitment, was a response to the grace and love of God, so that any who choose such a life could live a sanctified life. This life is lived not for themselves, but for the community, so that no one would know need, hunger, and want.

The trouble and promise of Acts 4 are for us as well. We should be troubled and challenged by this text enough to question our connection to our “stuff.” Maybe we’re not called to relinquish all earthly possessions and follow Jesus, few are. But we should definitely pay attention to all the component parts of Acts 4 to discover the promise and blessing:

1. There was a clear and definite belief, trust, and faith present in the church members.

2. This faith/trust/belief formed the foundation of their living through one heart and soul.

3. They trusted in God more than in things to live a sustainably communal life.

4. Their fear of lack shift to the joy of abundance, trusting in how God was nourishing their lives together.

5. They understood the greater mission of which they were all a part: sharing of good news, as Christ did “to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

For us today, it takes prayerfully-gained awareness to assess how to use our resources in the church community and how to live in relation to our personal stuff. The scripture even asks us to take a look at what we think of as our own, and say, “All that I have is a gift from God above. God supplies all my needs.” Trust, faith, and belief guide us to commit, with integrity and simplicity, all that we are and have to the service to which God calls us as individuals and as a community. God promises to dwell with us in this evangelical life.