Jon C. Swanson's Blog, page 2

On community.

Rich Dixon is orienting a new pastor. And reorienting us.

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Our church has a new senior pastor.

He told me he’d heard something about a bike ride, and he asked, “What’s the Freedom Tour about?”

It would be easy to say it’s about supporting 22 kids in a Home of Hope, providing the nutrition and shelter and safety and freedom they need to grow into healthy, strong men and women. And, of course, that’s part of it.

But it’s bigger and more complex than that, and also a good deal...

Things will happen.

Jesus and his disciples were walking outside the temple in Jerusalem. It was a pretty remarkable building, 400 by 500 yards. It was still under construction, and had been for 50 years.

Someone commented on how remarkable it was.

“This isn’t going to last,” Jesus said. “It’s going to be more destroyed than it was the last time.”

That caught the attention of the disciples. Bad news usually does. Words of impending doom capture our imagination, feed our sense of dread.

“When?” they s...

Catastrophizing.

I went to get some tests last week. Wellness tests. I wanted to check on some areas that I know can be problems.

I was laying on my back in the middle of one of them, while a machine was inflating the cuff on one arm and then the other. The person running the test suddenly stepped away and said, “Gail!” She was calling out. Her voice was a bit intense. 

When I read about these tests, I read that they will email the results. But they also say that if there is something concerning, they ...

A prayer for the thirty-third Sunday in ordinary time

God.

We are a sad and fearful people. Not all of us, of course. Some of us some of the time are happy and confident. And we don’t want to be fearful. But all of us know that we will face pain and will face death. And it shapes our thinking.

Sometimes we work hard to avoid pain. Sometimes we work hard to ignore life. We mostly wish we were better at accepting life.

We confess that we have spent more time this week worrying about what might happen than we have celebrating what we coul...

Remembering

Somewhere out there, under there, is the wreckage of a ship that some people have been thinking about this week. 50 years ago, off Whitefish Point, a ship broke apart, sank, and 29 people died.

Seventy-four years ago, or so, my dad was in the Army in Korea. Those who remembered veterans this week, those living and those not, were remembering people like my dad.

And this week, friends and students talked about loved ones who have died. And who keep coming to mind, keep being missed.

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Alive and different

When Jesus talks to the Sadducees about the afterlife, he’s not doing pastoral care. He’s not offering comfort, he’s not teaching us what we should say to grieving people. He’s outlining truth in a way that will silence a particular group that was attacking him.

Though you don’t believe it, there is an afterlife.It’s fundamentally different than this life, and that’s not bad.There’s no death there, so the things that depend on death in this life are different.Marriage, as a me...

Are We Serious?

Rich Dixon is serious about kids.

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Sometimes I wonder if we take Jesus seriously.

I recently ran across a quote from C. S. Lewis:

Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.

Surprising, perhaps, from a man whose penetrating analysis of Christianity is still studied and quoted more than 70 years after his death. But perhaps not so surprising, since Lewis was a serious man who took Jesus’ words seriously.

“Let the little childr...

On real questions

One day, some people who were Sadducees came to Jesus with story problem.

“Teacher,” they said. “We want to understand how to apply something that Moses taught.”

According to an interpretation of the law Moses handed down from God, if a man and woman were married and he died without any children, the man’s brother could marry the woman, and the first male child would have all the status and inheritance than the first brother’s son would have received.

In a culture where wealth was at...

More than one phrase.

“I’m afraid that he won’t know me in heaven.”

The woman in front of me was shaking as she talked. Their marriage had been good. Her life had been hard. She was clinging to his life even as it was being measured in hours at most.

If I had to guess, she had heard the words of Jesus in some sermon or conversation or something. Luke says them this way, “in the resurrection from the dead [they] will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the ang...

A prayer for the thirty-second Sunday of ordinary time.

God-

It’s so easy to lose track. Of our plans, of our direction, of you.

One fall, one fracture, one hospital stay, one cold, two bad nights of sleep and the lists we had and the projects we were working toward get lost.

It’s hard to keep our quiet routines as our time is tied to hospital time. “Soon” is ninety minutes. “Not sure until I look” puts the day into uncertainty. The visits that come with random regularity make it almost impossible to maintain a train of thought.

And as...