A Healthy Diet for a New Year - Humble Pie

Pastoral Pondering

by Pastor Keith Larson

Southeastern Iowa Synod Bishop Burk just returned from a trip with several other ELCA Bishops to Palestine. Last winter over 40 bishops from the ELCA and Canada visited Palestine. These visits were in part, to show our solidarity with the Lutheran Church and other Christians in Palestine. Palestine, known officially as the West Bank is occupied and controlled illegally by Israel. Israel has erected 20-foot high cement walls around many parts of Palestine. Where there are not imposing walls, there are various barbed wire, sandbag and other barriers. Currently, to visit Bethlehem, a person must pass through one of 3 checkpoints guarded by well-armed Israeli soldiers. While this is not too problematic for tourists, it adds hours and days to travel times for local Palestinian residents of Bethlehem who wish to visit family and friends or do business outside of this walled town. It is choking their livelihoods and their very existence.

But in the heart of Bethlehem is a church built over the site that is the supposed birthplace of Jesus. While one could never prove that this is really the place, for over 1800 years it is believed to be the place, and it certainly must be close to the place. And where it actually happened really is not so terribly important. But to stand in that little underground chapel was an awesome, spirit-filled experience for me as it is for most who visit the place.

Bishop Burk reflected recently on the main door to the Church of the Nativity. The main entrance of this church, which receives thousands of visitors each year, is but a few feet high. Any adult must stoop quite low to enter. Bishop Burk reflected that:

“The entrance to that Bethlehem church requires a change in our physical posture. A humbling reminder of precisely what God does for us in Jesus Christ. Our God stoops down, bends low, and with a love that throws caution to the wind, pursues us. Reaches us. Embraces us,...so that together, we might do the same. So that we might in all humility stand for and with those whose lives are made better by our standing with one another”.

Bishop Burk went on to say that this posture of humility is a good one for all of us to maintain in the new year.

We live in a world with too little humility. Too many people are too sure and certain of too many things, feeling right and righteous, stifling meaningful conversation and discussion. It is only with humility that we can truly engage one another and work for solutions to the complex problems and difficulties in our world.

Yes, the door to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem forces one into a posture of humility. But so does listening to the weather forecast. As I sit in my office on Tuesday morning, December 22, I realize I have very little control. It is frustrating. I so much want to celebrate Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with the people of Bethlehem and Saint Mark Lutheran. But if the roads are impassable, I cannot do anything about it.

The familiar prayer written by Lutheran pastor and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr is a wonderful prayer for all of us to start a new year and a new decade.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

The remainder of the prayer is not quite as familiar but every much as important:

Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as God did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that God will make all things right if I surrender to God’s Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with God Forever in the next. Amen. (paraphrased)