Dear friends,

2012 is a year of new beginnings as well as of looking back.  Parkview is entering a new century and looking back on an old one.  So much has happened to the world around this little church between 1912 and 2012.  It was horse and buggy days then and there were hardly any airplanes.  All the major vaccines had not been invented.  World War II hadn’t happened and neither had the roaring twenties.  We’ve be getting used to the Great Recession, but the Great Depression was so much worse.  Then came World War II and the internment, followed by the Korean Conflict, the Cold War, the Vietnam War and The Iraq and Afghanistan War. During all that came the fall of the Soviet Union and the Rise of Japan and then of China as economic powers. We went to the moon and in space on shuttles, developed electric cars and solar power and even people in their nineties use e-mail now.  All that while polluting the planet perhaps irreversibly.  So much has changed. In 1912 the world population was a little over two billion and now it is nearly seven billion.  What lies ahead?.  I don’t anyone would have predicted a hundred years ago what kind of century we would have.  Their predictions may have been more modest on the one hand and more magical on the other.  Think of what has happened to the Church. Who would have predicted the growth of the Church in Africa and South America and the decline of the Church in the West and North.  Who would have predicted that a Japanese American congregation would last a hundred years while other once thriving  congregations no longer exist?

Genesis 1 goes back much further in time, to the time of creation.  We are learning more and more about the origin of our planet and solar systems and of the tiny particles at the heart of creation.  Increasingly, we realize how little we know and how really weird science is, even weirder than religions.  They are talking about a universe with up to eleven dimensions.   We are going to be finding out things about who we are and where we live that we cannot even imagine.  Einstein’s  theory that no particle could travel faster than the speed of light is now on the verge of coming apart.  It is really quite exciting, but also very scary for many people.  What does this mean for our faith?  What will the theological questions for the next century of Parkview and how far will this little church get into that century? Will it defy the odds once more and make into a third century?  None of us will be around for that.  But it is exciting and gratifying that we are here to muse and wonder about that.  I think it is exciting at least.  You see, I don’t think we should be afraid of the challenges to this congregation and of the questions that will be asked of us.  Yes, our faith may be fragile and our commitment feeble, but we do live by our ability to have faith and our commitment. We live by God’s grace and by the Holy Spirit.  We are ultimately not in control.  By all demographic analyses we shouldn’t even be here anymore as a worshipping community, but we are, and no less vital than before.  We have tapped into the strength of the cultural diversity within our society and it has made us stronger.  He have done so while preserving and remembering the heritage.  What is key is our faithfulness to the Word.  While Genesis speaks of the creation of the world in the language of centuries ago, John 1 speaks of Christ being present as part of that creation since the beginning of time. This may be difficult to imagine, but the presence, the idea of Christ has always been there.  Christ has always been on God’s mind, in God’s heart since the beginning as a way for the Creator to express intimacy and close to us. Jesus has always been the “Word.”  Without Jesus there is no connection between the Creator and human beings. God had to become a crying child in a stable, vulnerable and weak, fragile like our faith, feeble like our commitment.  For Parkview to remain Parkview we must be loyal to that child and to that hope that has sustained the Church and this congregation over so many centuries. Without Him, he would be in danger of becoming another social organization that will run its course and fade away.  We see them all around us.  How many civic groups are trying to keep going beyond their expiration date?  That is the nice thing about the Church: it has no expiration date.  It has a lifetime guarantee, and a beyond life promise and hope.  That is something to celebrate and this is something we celebrate every Sunday on one way of another.

Se we are going into this second Parkview century with one important tool: God’s grace, but we can only fully tap into that grace if we keep our eyes on the “Word” that John talks about. For in that “Word” radiates light, light that can conquer any darkness if the new century.  Thanks be to God. Amen